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Spies Like Us: Tools & Tips for Monitoring the Competition
By Tina Kelly, online marketing
consultant, Netconcepts & Stephan Spencer,
president/CEO of Netconcepts
When it comes to search engine optimization, the
tools you arm yourself with are just as important as
your skill set. For your site to be successful, you
know you have to keep a close eye on your
competition. You just may not know the best way to
do this.
There are myriad tools available that can help you
keep tabs on what your rivals are up to, and much
more. Several tools help you track and monitor your
own Website, as well as gain valuable information
about your competitors. They can help you check
inbound links, and analyze keywords, rankings and
traffic on competitors' Websites, among other
things.
Where to start? There are some great SEO tools out
there that are not only free, but also reliable and
accurate.
SEOBook offers a number of valuable free tools:
• Backlink Analyzer (review anchor text of inbound
links)
• SEO for Firefox Extension (displays for each
listing in the Google search engine results page the
page's PageRank, domain age, site age, cache date,
numbers of backlinks with .edu and .gov broken out,
etc.)
SEOmoz offers for free:
• Trifecta (estimates popularity and importance of a
page or domain, predates the much better Linkscape
tool, which is subscription-only but well worth it)
• TermTarget (analysis of a page's declared keyword
focus)
• Linkscape (in a limited version that provides an
assessment of link authority, a close equivalent to
PageRank scoring but more precise and accurate)
Some additional free tools that are useful in
monitoring competitors include:
• MarketLeap (compare your link popularity against
your competitors)
• Thumbshots Ranking (compare common results between
engines, keywords)
• SEO-browser.com (page analysis; use “advanced”
mode to really dig in to the details on your
competitor)
• QuantCast (traffic and demographics of
competitors)
• Compete (traffic and referral analytics of
competitors)
• SpyFu (competitors' top keywords, estimated PPC
budget)
• Google Insights for Search (keyword popularity on
Google with historical trends and top-rising related
searches — make sure you're logged in or you won't
see numbers)
• Google Trends for Websites (traffic trends across
specified competitors and others, related Google
searches)
• Yahoo Site Explorer (inbound link reporting on
competitors, limited to 1,000 results)
• Wolfram Alpha (new search engine, or
“computational knowledge engine,” as they call it;
type in the competitor's company name then try its
domain name
In addition to monitoring competitors' keywords,
rankings, links and traffic, you should also keep up
to date on their latest news. And just as you keep
track of your own online reputation, you should also
monitor your competitors.
Use Google Alerts or Yahoo! Alerts to get automatic
e-mails when there is new competitor-related
results. Note that sometimes this “news” can be
outdated and redundant. You might also consider
signing up to receive your competitors' e-mail
marketing messages to monitor the news and offers
they are sending to customers.
Don't forget about all the social media outlets. If
your competitors are actively involved in social
media, be sure to “follow” them on
Twitter, “fan” or
“friend” them on
Facebook, and perhaps “link” with
them on
LinkedIn. You can also use TweetBeep to help
monitor competitors' Twitter mentions.
If this all sounds like too much to keep track of,
you are in luck: There is one more tool to help
simplify monitoring your competitors, and it will
save you a lot of time.
Use a feed reader to feed competitor news from
Google Alerts, Yahoo! Alerts, Twitter and other
RSS
feeds. There are several feed readers available; NetVibes and Google Reader are two of our favorites.
With this extensive list of tools for competitive
analysis at your disposal, you can do the forensic
analysis required to inform your own strategy and
tactics. This will, hopefully, enable you to
leapfrog your competition.
Chances are that only a fraction of these tools are
now being used in your company. That's a real
travesty — because, if that's the case, you're
letting your competition eat your lunch.
---Source: i-merchant July 27, 2009 (www.multichannelmerchant.com).
Tina Kelly & Stephan Spencer are with natural search
marketing firm Netconcepts (www.netconcepts.com).
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