After my last post on Why Compete Sucks, I found this SEOmoz post that seems to corroborate it on a larger scale. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of alternatives out there, so I thought I’d outline some other tools that can help provide competitive SEO information. I’ll focus first on free tools, but I will write about paid tools soon — I don’t mind paying a reasonable amount for something that’s accurate.
A few disclaimers:
- I’m not wild about Quantcast or Alexa, so I’ll leave those alone for now.
- There’s no substitute for a detailed manual analysis of competing sites, including code review, link and navigation analysis, and inspired bribery (kidding!).
- These tools are listed in no particular order.
Anyway, here are the free tools I’m currently using and/or evaluating for competitive SEO work:
- Using Google Trends for Websites, you can enter multiple competitors and view daily unique visitors, plus a comparison by region, sites visitors also visited, and keywords used to find these sites. This is of limited usefulness because the numbers are estimated approximations, and many smaller sites aren’t represented at all, but it may be a good starting place for some.
- Google Search Insights shows search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames. This is more useful for keyword research than it is competition, but the category and geographic tools are really interesting. I recently used this to show my CEO that if he really wants to target his pet search phrase, we need to focus our business in Sri Lanka – not what he expected.
- SEOdigger shows which search queries you are ranking in the top 20 Google results for.
- SpyFu claims to show competitors’ daily ad budget, clicks per day, average cost per click, organic keywords, and organic and paid competitors. Most of the data is behind a subscriber wall, but if you need more than the free stuff, it’s $40/month in the US. I’m still digging into exactly where their data comes from, but it looks like a data mining/web scraping company is behind it. Check your own site and see if it matches before committing to a subscription.
- Set the Wayback Machine, Sherman! This tool lets you look your competitor’s (or your own) site over the years, as far back as 1996. Aside from being just plain fascinating — at least, if you’re a big Internet nerd like me — the ability to see changes made over time can help you understand your market in a way that just looking at current sites can’t.
- Be an Internet stalker, or just look like one using DomainTools, where you can check out Whois history for any given domain. Also shows registry, index, and server information.
- Index Rank shows how fast your site is getting indexed. This is a quick indicator of how much your competitors’ sites are growing.
- Another rank checker, URLtrends allows you to enter all your competitors’ sites and check rankings, social bookmarks, and half a dozen different kinds of backlinks. It returns some interesting charts, and you can export results to Excel, or to PDF if you go with one of the paid versions.
- I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the free SEOToolset over on the Bruce Clay site. The Competition Research tool shows who your competition is for targeted keywords, and the current ranking of your top competitors across all the major search engines.
- SEOmoz’s Trifecta tool shows a site’s pagerank, DMOZ links, the number of mentions in Google news, blogs, and domains, rankings from various sources, and site age. It’s all about the popularity, baby.
- SEObook’s Link Popularity tool and shows backlinks for your site and up to three competitors. Their related Search Engine Saturation tool gives a quick view of how many pages you have indexed compared with up to three other sites.
- I like SEOBook’s SEO for Firefox extension. I leave it turned off most of the time, but if I’m doing competitive research it’s a quick way to see many things at a glance. Under each entry on the SERPs, this plugin shows search rank, several Google items such as PageRank and cache date, numerous Yahoo statistics, social media statistics from del.icio.us, Technorati, etc. It also lists ranking info from Alexa and Compete.com, which are of questionable value, but you can turn off the ones you don’t want. The extension also adds small links just below the Google search box for Google tools like the Keyword Estimator, Traffic Estimator, and Google Trends, — as well as SEOBook’s homegrown keyword estimator.
- Last but not least, the TouchGraph tool is well worth checking out. Just type in a URL or keyword phrase, and this tool finds related sites and displays a visual representation of the relationships between them – as reported by Google’s database of related sites. When you hover over an entity, it will highlight links between sites, and when you click the “+” in the corner of an entity, it will expand the chart around that site. This helps a great deal if you’re trying to understand what surrounds your site on the web.
Have I missed anything here?
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I really appreciate the fact that you are covering this because competitive intelligence is such an important need.
The wayback machine has been great for me on occasion – very useful when you want to find out how a competing website has developed. I also used it one time to find out about an old robots.txt file from a competitor.
SEOQuake is firefox extension kinda similar to the seobook SEO for firefox – I find it to be a little more useful though.
The tools listed here are all good for SEO specific research, but I find that there is also a need for good market research in general. Who is the market leader, who are the main competitors, how big is the market, etc.