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Internet
Marketing Tip of the Month
Five Tools for Competitive Analysis
October 2008
By
Matt Wilkinson, Internet Marketing Specialist
Live, from New York, it's... the
Search Engine
Strategies 2008 Conference and Expo! OK, perhaps it's not as exciting as
Saturday Night Live, but this annual conference is where Internet
Marketers go to learn about the latest news, tricks, tools and
resources for search engine marketing. I attended in order to stay on top of
the latest developments for your projects. This
year's hot topics included viral marketing, web analytics, social media
marketing and competitive research. Look for future tips of the month on all
of these topics, starting with this month, as we look at using search engine
optimization tools for competitive research.
As an Internet
marketer, I frequently use a number of online tools to
research, track and measure the results of our
Search Engine
Optimization and
Keyword Purchasing campaigns. However, you don't have to be an online
marketing specialist to use the tools below to gain valuable insight
into the strategies of your competitors. Here are five free tools for online competitive analysis:
Keep Track of Your Competitors
in the News
Sign up for
Google
Alerts to receive notifications (by e-mail) for news updates about your
company and your competitors. Simply enter the search terms you would like
to track (company names, products, websites, etc.) and choose the frequency of
your updates (daily, weekly, or as-it-happens). Google
will e-mail you when your selected search terms appear in Google's
aggregated collection of news, blogs, videos, etc.
Analyze the
Traffic of Your Competitors' Websites
Search metric sites, such as
Compete.com and
Alexa.com, provide estimated
traffic numbers for many websites. Data is collected from a sample Internet
audience through user-installed toolbars. There is some debate regarding the
accuracy of these traffic estimates, as the sample audience may not be
representative of the entire Internet population. Also, less-trafficked
sites tend to have little to no information. However, both tools can provide
useful insight into the overall traffic trends for many of your competitor's
websites.
Find Out What Keywords Your Competitors Are Buying
KeyCompete,
KeywordSpy and
SpyFu allow you to gain insight into your
competitor's keyword purchasing campaigns (pay-per-click advertising.) Each
site allows you to search by keyword or website, the latter providing
search terms that a website is "bidding" on. All three tools restrict the
number of results in the free versions of their respective tools. If more data is needed,
you would need to purchase subscription packages.
Keep Track of Updates
to Your Competitors' Websites
Remember what the internet looked like in 1996? So does the
Internet Archive Wayback Machine. The
Wayback Machine keeps archived versions of websites for future
reference. While browsing your old homepage from 1998 can be quite nostalgic, the Wayback Machine can also be used for competitive research.
Use this tool to check for past
updates to your competitors product or service offerings. Or, use the Wayback Machine to see how your competitors overall online strategy has
changed over the years.
Identify Sites That Link
to
Your Competitors
The quantity and quality of incoming links to a site is one of the most
important elements of search engine optimization. However, finding links
from appropriate websites can be a tedious and time-consuming task.
Thankfully, the search engines give us an easy way to generate ideas for
possible link partners. Simply enter "link:www.YourCompetitor.com" in the
Yahoo or Google search field to find out who is linking to your competitor.
Use this to examine link opportunities on industry-related sites, blogs and directories.
The above tools represent a small sampling of the resources available for
online competitive research. For more information or for assistance with
your Internet
Marketing strategy, contact
Dynamics Online
today.
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