Tools to find your online market enemy
In any business, knowing your competition is important. It is even more important when it comes to an online business as there are many more competitors vying for the limited amount of potential customers available. In many cases, it is not even direct competitors you need to worry about. It is more important to know the indirect competition which is made up of savvy individuals who know how to get their websites ranked high on search engines.
These savvy individuals are able to get their websites appearing first in search engine results pages for all the keywords and phrases your customers are likely to search for. One thing they do on a daily basis is monitor their competition – people like you who might rank for a keyword they want to rank for. They monitor competitors using various tools you can also access and use to analyze data.
Sites that offer tools to help research competition include:
1. semrush.com
2. compete.com
3. quantcast.com
4. alexa.com
5. keycompete.com
The list is not exhaustive as there are dozens of other sites offering similar insights into the keywords a competitor ranks and gets traffic for. Some of the sites listed offer a free service that provides limited insight. The idea is that you can make use of these services and vastly improve the overall targeting and ranking of your domains. Other sites not included in the list charged higher fees with some aimed at corporate companies only.
Through using multiple competition evaluation sites you can build up a better picture of where your target demographic hangs out. This can result in you finding better sites to target with your adverts or more keywords you may have overlooked.
If you uncover a competitor advertising exclusively on a small number of sites, it stands to reason they continue advertising on those sites because it is profitable. Detailed competitor analysis can turn an unprofitable advertising campaign into a profitable campaign by reducing non-converting keywords, finding good converting keywords and finding ideal websites to advertise with.
When it comes to dealing with the indirect competition for specific keywords and phrases, detailed competition analysis makes it easier to identify the ones you should focus on. The indirect competitors are unlikely to use advertising, but they will make use of the sites their target demographic uses to get free links whenever they can. This helps boost the ranking of their site for that specific keyword and can result in you losing traffic to them.
The technology and tools available for monitoring and analyzing competition will continue to evolve. Savvy webmasters and business owners will stay on top of new developments as this will help them stay ahead of their competition. It is important you do not get left behind.
Check out the sites listed, play about with the information available and figure out which site or combination of sites will prove valuable to you and your business. You should also take a look at any site offering a competition analysis service and decide whether it can play an important role in improving the performance of your site.
Just because it wasn’t listed here doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. The reason only 5 sites are listed is to give you quick access to some of the more widely used sites. Don’t get left behind, analyze your competition today and see how you can drive your business forward tomorrow.
You just learned a pretty good way to stay ahead of your competition in search engine marketing by using free or low cost tools to analyze your competitors’ sites, keywords and advertising techniques properly. Tomorrow we’ll send you another tip on using various backlink types to ensure that search engines ‘like’ your site better than the others!
Pankaj Singh best expertise in SEO, SMO, ASP.NET/ASP.NET 2.0, C#/VB.NET, .NET Framework, SQL Server (T-SQL, Stored Proc, DTS), UML. Skilled in XML/XSLT, XML Web Services, HTML/DHTML, CSS, JavaScript, OOP, SourceSafe, Java, MTS/COM+, C++, ADO.NET, OLTP, OLAP, data warehousing, MySQL, FoxPro (VFP), Crystal Reports, SQL Reporting Services and more.
