In the marketplace competition is natural. As a buyer of goods and services, would you really want to buy a product or service that was only offered by one vendor? Consider this point, those exclusive opportunities and one of a kind products often equate to higher prices and limited support. Since the goal of search engine optimization is to get your pages to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPS), evaluating your online competitors is a given. An SEO competitive analysis is an essential step that leads to market intelligence.
Here are five online tools that are readily available to acquire competitive data and market insight.
Compete.com uses survey data along with their massive database of U.S. internet users, to collect information on pages visited and online behavior. Having access to over 2,000,000 users enables compete.com to provide data on site metrics, rankings and more.
Quantcast collects and measures data from over 90K partner publishers and marketers. According to Quantcast, the data is anonymous and contains no personally-identifiable information. According to cruchbase.com, Quantcast uses what they call a Mass Inference algorithm to produce refined profiles that they believe accurately represent web audiences. Users can see estimates for gender, age, household income, and other demographic information.
Yahoo! Site Explorer is a tool set which lets marketers access the information about a site’s online presence. You can see which sites and inside pages are indexed by Yahoo! Also, you can see a list of inbound links. Yahoo Site Explorer can be used for a rapid high level competitor evaluation.
Alexa Site Information can be used to learn about related sites, site overviews and traffic details; Alexa has developed a database of information about sites. The information can be easily accessed by visiting Alexa.com
Google Page Rank is used to identity the importance of a page based upon Google measurements. The PageRank is determined by t he number of inbound links on the page as well as the PageRank of the referring pages. SEO experts agree, the PageRank is controversial and is not always the best indicator of the importance of a page.
Yes, there is competitor in the marketplace, but with some elbow grease and good tools you can use competitors data to you advantage. It’s never too late to identify and evaluate your competitors.