Things and Tools to Consider When Analyzing Competitors

1. Identify Your Competitors

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 Similar Sites also gives you a view of what your competitors are good at: www.example.com is rank 1 in Word Press tutorial, 13 in Photoshop tutorial, 2 in web resources, etc.

2. Search Engine Ranking

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.

3. Traffic is good for business

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.

4. Importance of Keywords

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.

5. Backlinks

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 link building 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.

6. Social Networks

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.