Keep An Eye On Your Competitors: Ultimate Guide
August 19th, 2010 | Link-Assistant.Com | Posted in category GuestBoxby Dmitry Gushchin
The importance of keeping an eye on your competitors can not be overestimated. Do not doubt that they are keeping an eye on your business, and you should be doing the same.
There are dozens of free and paid competitive research tools available to determine how large competitor's traffic is, what the traffic sources are, how well a competitor's website is doing in SERPs, social network sites, etc. I have rounded up the tools to manage your competitor research easily and effectively.
Identify Your Competitors
Determine who your competitors and what their rankings for targeted keywords are.
Competitive Research Tool by EasySeoTracking can help you here. It's a powerful online service which generates the list of closest competitors as well some SEO parameters: Page Rank, number of back links, presence of keywords in the URL and title, number of unique visitors by Compete, number of Google requests per month. Moreover, it analyzes competitor's backlinks to let you know how quality they are, and which link building strategies your competitor uses.
No doubts, it's a helpful and easy-to-use competitive research tool.
Identify and Monitor Competitor's Traffic Sources
It's obvious how vital traffic estimation is to a website analysis and how useful traffic tools are. Though all of them provide approximate data, you can still get some helpful information out of them.
Compete – a web analytics tool which shows traffic trends for competing websites head to head: number of unique visitors, monthly and yearly change, top search terms, referring sites, etc. A powerful competitive research tool "to tap into your competitors online marketing strategies."
Analyze Competitor's Website
There are a lot of factors you should analyze besides website traffic. That's exactly what WebsiteGrader does.
WebsiteGrader is a free competitive research tool that evaluates the marketing effectiveness relying on website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical details. You can also get some basic advice on how to improve your website from a marketing perspective. I recommend using WebsiteGrader if you want to get the complete picture of your competitor's strengths and weaknesses.
Track Competitors Using Social Media
Thanks to social media you can watch every single move your competitor makes. To fulfill it, you do not need to spend thousands on brand monitoring tools, since there are free alternatives like SocialMention.
SocialMention provides a real-time search through blogs, microblogs, comments, events, networks, bookmarks, etc. You can also receive free daily email alerts of competitor's brand, company, CEO or marketing campaign. SocialMention makes monitoring your competitor easier and time-saving.
Follow these steps by using the mentioned competitive research tools to build up a picture of where your competitors are at and what makes them tick. Yet, do not focus on competition analysis too much. See what they are doing, advance it and move on to concentrating on your own product.
About the Author
This is a guest post by Dmitry Gushchin, creator of Easy SEO Tracking service. The service helps SEO specialists manage their campaigns easily and effectively. Check one of the tools provided by the service right now: Competitive Research Tool.
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Hey there,
Actually it's a guest post by Dmitry Gushchin. We're not promoting any of the services listed above. Guess it's time for a more explicit disclaimer =)