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Being secured in your online business is not all about setting up your defenses but also by analyzing your competitors. Keeping track of what services they offer work for them and how they bring people into their site will provide a good overview of how to improve your business. No matter how they hide their trails, there will always be tools that will let you analyze and track your competitors.
Ready for research? Let’s start right now!
First thing to do is to identify your competitors. I find SimilarSites.com accurate and one of the most simplest tool to use.
It has a voting system for every result if it is similar or not and SimilarSites also gives you a view of what your competitors are good at: www.example.com is rank 1 in WordPress tutorial, 13 in Photoshop tutorial, 2 in web resources, etc.
Image by: Christian Ferrari
It is important that you know Page Rank. Google ranks websites according to their popularity, and obviously it gives you an idea on how competitors use their resources effectively.
An alternative to Google Page Rank is SEOmoz.com. Free registration and you are good to go with their Trifecta Tool Report. They have their own ranking system which I fancy, reading “44% – Somewhat Important”. Better to top all rankings instead of just one, right? However, regular members can only run one report per day.
Image by: Sigurd Decroos
Analyzing your competitors’ traffic gives you an idea on the number of visitors they get. Google Trends, Alexa, GetClicky are good tools to compare statistics, they let you see on what regions the website is doing great as well as what search terms prospect visitors might search for. It is also good to note competitors that are not doing well in order to avoid being like them, more like a grave example.
The next thing to know, after learning what websites have good traffic, is how effective their keywords and link building is.
It all comes down to keywords, it tells search engines the content of your site. Wrong keyword means no traffic. A successful competitor knows full well what keywords to use to harvest visitors to their site.
A tool to see good keywords in your niche is SEOdigger.com.
It provides a list of domains with common keywords and shows the position of the site for the search query in Google and what among them brings more traffic. It gives you enough facility to compare several competitors’ performance in SEO.
There are many instances when a higher PR website is outmatched by those with lower PRs, this is due to careful manipulation and good use of keywords. Thankfully you can see what keywords your competitors are using and which of them has the biggest impact. That’s what I call handy.
I almost forgot to mention Google Wonder Wheel. It provides relevant terms of your search query of what is gaining popularity among searchers. Neat, eh?
Image by: Svilen Milev
Backlinks do two things to help promote your site if done correctly. First it serves as a tunnel from a website to yours, if the referring website is of high standing the better. Second it boosts your keywords. Have I not said that it’s all about keywords?
Knowing who the promoters are of sites within your niche is like learning some of the enemy’s strategies. This may serve you well in terms of knowing what direction your linkbuilding should go. It will be a good thing if the website that links to your competitor will take interest in you as well. Remember that good competitors have good backlinks.
Image by: Sanja Gjenero
Facebook is aiming to be the web’s standard for everything you do online. With its Open Graph,websites will customize themselves based on their users’ interests through the Like button. Imagine logging in to Amazon and finding all of the things that interests you neatly arranged on their home page without even having to search for it. Just thinking about it makes me shiver! It is predicted that in the very near future, Facebook will be the one to drive more traffic on websites, the blood of e-commerce! And most likely other major networking sites will follow this lead.
Consider following your competitors on Twitter and subscribe to their newsletter and blog. You may also want to search Twitter and see what people are posting about your search query and know how they’re feeling about it.
There are more than a hundred tools in the web for analyzing competition, below are some of the easiest to use:
Estimates global traffic for websites. It is pretty flexible. You may compare statistics on the spot, who the audience are, worldwide traffic rank, and many more.
It boasts 4 main tools in running reports for good estimate of site analysis, performance, and general recommendation.
Provides most of the information you need about backlinks.
Another great tool to track web traffic. Boasts analytics in real-time.
If you feel like spying and be alerted whenever your competitors appear in the web then Google Alerts is right for you. It is pretty flexible and fast too. I remember using it to keep track of Harry Potter and in just a day almost 300 blogs, videos, news, and everything appeared about my search term! People are broadcasting about this fantastic website? Be alerted and see why.
These are free tools that you can use to analyze your website and competitors. There are a lot of paid tools out there but most have the same usage as the tools above.
Everywhere you go, information and correct execution leads to success. Good luck to all!
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Rean is the editor of 1stwebdesigner. He regularly writes about freelancing, technology, web design, and web development. Rean also writes at Knowledge Salad, a blog filled with weird and interesting facts. One of his goals is to help his fellow Filipinos earn money online, to help them build a career out of working from home, just like what he has been doing for years now.
Thursday, October 28th, 2010 14:03
Fantastic information, can’t thank you enough. Some excellent resources to look into there.
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010 13:01
Great article, and some very helpful resources to check out with analysing competitors, and some just good to analyse my own websites, Thanks!
Monday, October 18th, 2010 12:16
Awesome article . . . . Many Thanks. . . . .
Monday, October 18th, 2010 09:09
I’m about to start an online business and this is very helpful for me, You are a good writer because you tell things simple and straight.
I’m new to web and this tools that you mentioned are very useful I think. Looking forward for your next articles, cheers!
Sunday, October 17th, 2010 23:56
Nice tips. Thank you for your explanations.
Sunday, October 17th, 2010 19:05
Hi Rean, thanks great article with a lot of practical information. Some we currently use, others I wasn’t aware of but will sure investigate and pass on to our small business friends on our networks. Thanks again
Saturday, October 16th, 2010 18:57
Google is so diverse because you can use it to take into account a huge range of different factors that might relate to your site. This could be locality, services offered etc. Thanks for sharing the other analytic and data sources as well.
Saturday, October 16th, 2010 18:46
Honestly well written and amazing techniques used..Thanks for the tips
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Dathan Nicholson
Saturday, October 16th, 2010 00:58
Compete.com is a very good one also.
Herb Lawrence
Sunday, October 17th, 2010 19:05
Hi Rean, thanks great article with a lot of practical information. Some we currently use, others I wasn’t aware of but will sure investigate and pass on to our small business friends on our networks. Thanks again
Scott
Saturday, October 16th, 2010 18:57
Google is so diverse because you can use it to take into account a huge range of different factors that might relate to your site. This could be locality, services offered etc. Thanks for sharing the other analytic and data sources as well.
Rahul
Saturday, October 16th, 2010 18:46
Honestly well written and amazing techniques used..Thanks for the tips
subhamay
Sunday, October 17th, 2010 23:56
Nice tips. Thank you for your explanations.
Rassel Jan David
Monday, October 18th, 2010 09:09
I’m about to start an online business and this is very helpful for me, You are a good writer because you tell things simple and straight.
I’m new to web and this tools that you mentioned are very useful I think. Looking forward for your next articles, cheers!
paultyl
Thursday, October 28th, 2010 14:03
Fantastic information, can’t thank you enough. Some excellent resources to look into there.
Craig
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010 13:01
Great article, and some very helpful resources to check out with analysing competitors, and some just good to analyse my own websites, Thanks!
Rajasekar
Monday, October 18th, 2010 12:16
Awesome article . . . . Many Thanks. . . . .