competitive analysis tools

Competitive Analysis Tools

Knowing what your competition targets is important. If you’re just starting your online marketing campaign or if you find that you’re current paid or organic listings aren’t driving enough relevant traffic, you can always take a look at what your competition is doing in terms of their ads.

§                     SEM Rush offers a snap shot of a domain’s distribution of top Google keyword rankings. This is great if you want to know which keywords a website already ranks for.

§                     Compete.com is a paid tool that can give you a relative traffic comparison of different sites; nice if you want a rough estimate of how much traffic a website really gets. Google also has a similar website trends tool.

§                     Domaintools.com shows you a domain’s statistics including site age, web server OS, who owns it, etc.

§                     Quantcast offers insights into a website’s demographics, a cool tool for figuring out if the site in question contains your target audience in case you wanted to advertise via a few links.

§                     Google’s insights for search shows you how people search based on geological regions and time frames.

§                     The Yahoo! vs. Google visual comparison tool draws pretty lines showing the two engines ranking the same content in different positions—good for finding topical, authoritative pages and interesting to see how the two engines differ in their ranking algorithms.

LINK ANALYSIS TOOLS

Check out your site’s backlink profile and compare to your competition. Search engines rank your website in large part based on your site’s inbound link profile because links are difficult to fake and represent recomendations or other sites “talking” about you — the more you are talked about the more relevant you become and thus the higher you rank.

§                     Open Site Explorer is built from SEOMoz’s Linkscape data (their own web index), and is a web-based, comprehensive and easy to use tool with tons of good data points.  One thing I really like is the unique linking root domains and the quick look at a site’s anchor text profile.

§                     Blekko offers a look at the web pages linking back to a site, similar to how Yahoo Linkdomain used to work

§                     We have a back link checking tool that makes it easy to query Blekko to view a domain’s inbound linking pages

§                     Majestic SEO has a really nice bulk backlink checking tool and offers a comprehensive set of paid link analysis tools

§                     We also have an anchor text analysis tool based on backlinkwatch.com.  Backlinkwatch has become a little spammy with their popups but once you get passed that the data is still pretty decent to look at.

LINK ACQUISITION TOOLS

§                     Link search gives you a list of search engine queries that are targeted to return sites giving you the opportunity to leave comments, add your website link and or purchase (no followed) links relevant to your industry.