Tools that you can use for SEO Competition Analysis
Hi! This is Samuel Junghenn and I Just want to run you through today 8 powerful tools that you can use to analyze your competition. We’re just going to run through them very briefly and I’m not going to go in-depth. You can have a look at them and gather up information about your competition in your own time.
Alexa
Alright so let’s start with Alexa! This is alexa.com – let’s just do a quick dig on Facebook so we can do a search for Facebook. Now what it pulls up is that it pulls up search queries for Facebook. It also tells us how much traffic the site has got in the world and where it ranks. It currently ranks number two in the US and currently ranks number two in the world for the most amount of traffic.
You can see you know, if the traffic is going up or down so we can see some search terms and it’s mainly people that already know Facebook that are coming to it. We can see search terms that are arriving or falling and we can go to audience and we can see how many people in what age group and what sex, their education, browsing location and if they have children.
These are all pretty important information if you are thinking of starting a business or if you are already in a market, it’s good to know where your competitors are getting their traffic and what the audience is. Scroll down and you can see where they are coming from or where most of the traffic is coming from.
Go to related links you can see some of the competition – it gives you a good idea. So you might be in the market already and you might know of a couple of competitors. Let’s say if you type in the website and you come here, you might uncover a few more competitors that you didn’t know about here.
Let’s jump over the quick stream – you can see where people came from. The Upstream, so most people are coming from Google so they are probably typing in Facebook into the Google search bar or they are coming from Youtube, next then Yahoo and so on and so on. Downstream is where they go after they’ve been to Facebook and so you can see most of the sites here are pretty much the same as the upstream.
We can also see if there is any review on the website as well and up here you got the amount of sites linking back to Facebook so overall you can tell where your competition are getting their traffic from, you can tell where traffic is going afterwards, you can tell what keywords are driving traffic to the website and gives you a little bit of SEO data. Overall Alexa is a great tool and the best thing about it is that it’s totally free.
Quantcast
Okay let’s jump over to the next one – quantcast. Quantcast does quite a similar thing but doesn’t give you as much free data as Alexa does but gives you some interesting information none the less. So once again you can see the sex, age group, the race, if they have kids, average income and if they ever go to college etc.
Down here I love this; you can see that globally 76 percent of people are addicted to Facebook which is probably not surprising and so yet another free tool that you can use to analyze your competition which is great.
SEM Rush
SEM Rush is another fantastic tool and they got free and paid versions. The free version gives you some good data but it’s limited to the amount that you can actually see and so down on the side here you can see how many organic keywords its ranking for about 1.4 million, its running ads and how many organic competitors it’s got.
Down here you got a bit of a graph of the same- it’s currently getting about 52,000 search engine traffic per month and It’s currently getting nearly 200,000 traffic from paid ads and search engines. The ad price is about $335,000 base spending on paid ads per month and Up here you can see the terms again you can click on there for more extensive reports.
It tells you the competitors or those that it thinks are competitors -competitors with ads and so you can just click on here. If you don’t have a paid account you’ll just see a screen like this – so what it will do is that it will just block off the rest of the information until you have a paid account.
There is also an SEO Quake plugin for Firefox browser which will give you some of these data when you just visit a site or when you are in a Google search results page it will send you some information about your competition just for a quick analysis. So if you have Firefox it’s worth downloading that plugin and running it while you browse the internet. Cool! So let’s move along!
Compete.com
We got compete.com-it doesn’t give you a lot of data free which doesn’t mean it’s not as good as the others. However if you want to buy the paid account, it does give you some amazing information. So this is pretty much what it gives you free and it’s not a whole lot but if you upgrade into a paid account it does give you a whole lot of other fantastic information. Just check out all the products that you get with your complete account.
Okay so that’s it for general competition analysis tools. Now let’s jump into social media.
Wild Fire
This is a very cool tool done by Wild Fire Social media. Let’s just grab, I just got two twitter accounts here. Just for demo sake. What we can do is just drop in the Facebook pages, Twitter pages or both of a few different sites so you can run this against your competition or you can run a few of your competitors against each other to see who is doing good stuff on social media.
Alright so if we have a look here, we can see that Orange is an SEO Book and they’ve been growing relatively steadily over time but we have a look down here, there is SEOMoz and they just sort of, about April 2011 they just taken off and experienced exponential growth there. So you can go there and have a look at SEOMoz and have a look at the strategy that they are using for their Twitter and see what you can do to emulate that with the same success.
Okay so we have a different graph here, here is the daily information. Okay so this one is just at monitor.wildfireapp.com. Very cool tool and once again it’s totally free.
Keyword Spy
Now let’s move over to PPC. Okay so if you are doing any paid advertising on Google Adwords, you want to see what your competition is doing. Now both of these tools I’m going to show you have free trials and they have a paid option as well. So let’s have a quick analysis on Facebook again.
So this is just in the free account, this is what you can see – so it tells you how much Facebook is spending per day with the ad budget. It tells you some of the keywords that they are using and it also tells you their competition running the same or similar ads targeting the same keywords. It will show you some ad variations that they are running at the time and it will also show you some organic keywords that they ranking for as well and their organic competition.
There is some of their organic listings and down there you got – you can click more specifically so you can see that Facebook is running about 465,000 ads. This is only in the free account that I am in at the moment so we only get to see the top ten.
Once again you can see:
- the ads
- you can see the keywords
- you can see how much volume that keyword has got
- how much they are spending in a week roughly
- where their ads are being shown and what position
- How many times their ads are seen and when their ads were first and last seen.
So it’s quite a powerful tool. Once again you can:
- drill down into the keywords more
- You can drill down into the organic keywords and
- You can drill down on the competition.
So once again if you are only aware of one or two players in your market with competition, you can put their URL in here and you will find a whole heap of other competitors that you might have not heard before. Plus you are getting all these other data giving you ideas for keywords and how to write ads. So that’s it for Keywordspy.com.
Spyfu
Let’s jump over to Spyfu. Spyfu is very similar to Keyword Spy. Once again it will tell you:
- how much you are spending or how much your competition is spending
- average ad position
- Organic traffic and paid vs. organic.
- Down here you got keywords that you are using, paid keywords, the top competitors, the organic keywords and the top organic competition.
Now the reason you are going to have to use both of these is because sometimes the tools run a little bit differently and they pick up on different elements possibly. So you might get more keywords from Spyfu that you didn’t see on keyword spy or different ads and you might find different competition. So if you run them through both of these you are going to be pretty well covered. Okay so that’s it for PPC.
Majestic SEO
Now let’s jump over to Majestic SEO and this is for fondly enough, an SEO competition analysis tool or your own site if you get stuck into SEO a little bit more. Okay so that will come back and this is the fresh index so this is over the last 30 days and here it tells how many referring domains are linking to Facebook and here it tells how many backlinks have gone to Facebook within the last 30 days.
So there’s about 3 trillion backlinks over the last 30 days which is pretty astronomical. You can use historic as well and that is how many links are pointing back over that domain. Down here you can see the top backlinks that are pointing to your site.
So this is all free data that you can get once again. Just down here it tells you the top pages. We can dig into top backlinks a bit more. You can go to referring domains and dig into that. It will show you the top referring domains.
If you get a paid account you can see a lot more information but you can dig up quite a lot with the free one as well. You can check back link history, you can do two back links- let’s just do Facebook and Twitter nice and easy. So here we can see how many backlinks each of them have and compare them side by side. We can see here that they are pretty close actually and so you can run them side by side.
You can do a neighborhood check to see what other domains are in their hosting you might pick some other competitor’s domain there. So once again have a play around with it and you’re going to dig up a whole bunch of fantastic information for free.
Market Samurai
Now last one that I want to show you very briefly is Market Samurai. Market Samurai has a free trial again and it also has a paid option as well. It’s only a hundred dollars or something which is ridiculously cheap. It’s worth getting the paid version and it’s on a 30 day trial I believe that the SEO competition works and after the trial expires I think you’re going to have to upgrade to the paid version.
So this is how the paid version looks like in the SEO competition. You can quite easily see – I’ll put a keyword in there “internet marketing” and then I’ll let it run. It tells you a lot of important factors for ranking your website. I’m not going to go into SEO in-depth in here but what am I showing you is this very cool tool that you can see very quickly how likely it is that you will rank for a keyword and how much work you have to do to actually rank for that keyword.
Here we can see – these are all the sites that are ranking from 1 to 10. Here is the domain age, the page rank of the website, how many pages they got on their website, how many referring domains are pointing back to their site, how many domains are pointing back to that actual page, how many backlinks, how many backlinks to the domain, how many edu and gov links, if they got a yahoo listing, the keywords in the title tags, the keywords in the URL, the description and the header.
So if it’s black it means that it’s quite competitive. Once again this is a fantastic tool for seeing very quickly how competitive a keyword is to rank for in the search engines. Apart from just that section of the tool, you can also do keyword research. Rank trackers can keep track of where you are ranking for all your different keywords.
You can search for domains in your industry and there’s a whole other bunch of cool things that market samurai does as well. So you can get that at internetmarketsamurai.com.
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