Three Tools for Website Competitive Analysis

There are a wealth of free tools out there for checking your website, but there are three great tools you can use to check out how your website stacks up to your competition.

1) SEMRush.com – This is the main website I use for competitive analysis on my websites.  If you type in the URL of your website or one of your competitors, you can quickly get a ballpark figure on the amount of traffic each site receives (organic vs. paid), a list of top keywords you rank for in natural search and a list of competitor sites that rank for the same search terms.  You can also type in a keyword and semrush.com will give you average search volume for that keyword, average cost per click for that keyword if you purchase PPC ads for it and a list of websites that target that keyword.  Pretty awesome stuff.

2) Alexa.com – A lot has been said about how simple it is to trick Alexa ratings but, at the end of the day, they are still a decent yardstick for putting a simple number on how your website ranks against your competition.  The whole process is very simple, just visit their site, enter the URL of your site and they’ll give you a number.  Maybe it’ll be 10,000,000, maybe it’ll be 100,000, maybe it’ll not even register at all, but the point is that you’ll get a number.  When you compare that against your competition, you can quickly get an idea of just what kind of competition your facing.  The core of Alexa’s ranking system is based on users using the Alexa toolbar that visit your site.  While there are a *ton* of users with the Alexa toolbar installed, their metrics aren’t the gospel.  Take them with a grain of salt, but the point is to measure how you rank against your competition and work on the basics to improve your search engine rankings.

3) Google.com – Great Google rankings is the object of many an entrepreneur’s affection.  Fortunately for you, Google can also be used to analyze your competition so you can hone in on their weaknesses and attack.  The process is simple.  Find the keywords you are targeting, do a google search for that keyword, and look at the top ranking sites for that keyword.   Analyze your competitors and learn what kind of content they have, what sort of search engine optimation they’ve done on their site and who links to them.  To find out the last part, who links to them (a critical part of building authority for your site), pop over to www.yahoo.com and type in ‘link:<url to website>’ (without the quotes) to find out who is linking to the site.  The “inlinks” button towards the top of the results page will show other sites linking to you. 

These three tips will get you started on a great competitive analysis for your website.  Enjoy!