Your website is only as good as your authority, trust and ranking, and your competitors are continuously working to make you less relevant and more obscure.
Here are tools and tips to keep your search engine ranking by checking on what your competitors are doing.
Spyfu is a great tool to quickly see what keywords your competitors rank for in the natural and paid search results. Find out what ad copy they use, their daily ppc spend, and track changes they make. This is a great place to start for competitive data mining.
The keywords your competitors use may converting better than your keywords. You can use adsense to test what sites will be triggered for what keywords.
Check who links to them using tools such as opensiteexplorer.org, yahoo site explorer and majesticseo.com this can give a good indication of professional partners and associations you may wish to join.
Check online information hubs including PRWeb search, Digg.com, and article aggregators such as ezinearticles.com to see what content your competition is trying to promote and what keywords they are trying to rank for.
Check local review websites such as citysearch.com, yelp.com, google places and special review sites such as the BBB trustlink.com to see if they offer specials or custom events. You can undercut them on price or special announcements if you find out their plans in advance.
AuthorityLabs.com allows you to examine competitors side by side to identify which keywords they use.
Social Media tools that can help with finding competitors data
- Social Media For Firefox plugin by 97th Floor. Use a search for link:www.competitor.com
- Knowem
- Who’s Talkin
- Twitter Search/Lists now with advanced search operators
- Listorious
- Image Search
- SEO For Firefox plugin
One of the best methods to research competitors is to search their HTML code including the Robots.txt file. Sometimes hidden sections are listed including: a test site, pictures, a new product, additional domain name. Search for possible partners and collaborators and check http://dotheyfolloweachother.com to see who people in your competitors’ business follow on twitter.
Follow their company on LinkedIn.com, fan the Facebook page. If a person leaves their group you can call them to find out why. Find all employees of a company and follow them using private lists. They will talk disarmingly as they feel they are anonymous (for example they may give details if they’ve had a bad day)
Continuously read their content and consider emailing them about links to outdated content and request a link to your better content on your domain.
Become an affiliate of all competitors to find out how much they pay (gives an indication of their margins) and earnings per click (indicates traffic and conversions).
Blekko.com is an amazing new search engine that provides real link data, ranking metrics and updated search feeds. To see all sites a person owns use these searches: /adsense=COMPANYADSENSEID /analytics=ANALYTICSID
Quarkbase.com lists company information including twitter mentions, physical location and social profiles.
Twittercircles.com lets you find influencers on twitter.
Find sympathetic bloggers and authors who consistently work for a site, and ask them to write for you. many companies use guest posting services, and these are great people to ask to write articles and posts for you.
Tineye.com will show where an individual has other profiles and if they are legitimate.
Use domaintools.com alert for domain name changes to see registration updates or new domains in the same account. Use mark-alert for brand name research to search for word stems using a company brand.
The Google search modifiers “submitted on” OR “submitted by” OR “discovered by” OR “posted by” will determine which content is being submitted and from whom. Look for the pattern of when new content is being promoted or submitted. Try to get into this circle, and TwitterCircles.com can help identify who competitors are connecting with.
Oodle.com/job helps show job listings which indicate company changes. Look up a competitors name, create an RSS feed and aggregate multiple competitors and jobsites.
A tactic we have seen played on us is someone pretending to be a Venture Capitalist and wants to know your competitive information on the phone to get an idea of investment potential in your company. We have also had people pretending to be a student and say that they are writing it up for their school newspaper. These are underhanded and not good for the web community, remember Karma.
This session was in the Pubcon conference presented by @graywolf @Streko @MattSiltala and @andybeal
Image via Veer.com read more about competitive intelligence from seo.com, Matt Siltala’s slides,
37 Responses
such a great website.
Pretty well. many thanks for write-up.
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pretty well.
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good job.
Very interesting SEO subject for spying on competition. “The reason people sweat when they is so they won’t catch fire when ranking high.”
I need competitive intelligence to spark our social media consulting firm.
Your SEO advice page is like your possess area on the Net where you can supply your message to hundreds of 1000’s of your audience. But SEO is a finite traffic generation strategy.
Once I originally commented I clicked the -Notify me when new comments are added to this search engine marketing thread – Thanks for providing a great service!
Is most emphatically not the way the Commission on SEO’s Future promoted their recent report on a study of online marketers conceived through SEMPO. This research shows that old search engine tactics no longer work.
The new backlink intelligence you have discovered in your research is something we uncovered about 1 month ago and have implemented it on all our web properties.
i just finished deluxe SEO on our site, which is all about the luxury industry promoting our products online.
an incredible article, we are a brand new Orange County SEO firm and are trying to provide agency services for our clients. Thanks for the search engine tips, do you have any paid offerings?
Yahoo has been killing us, even through we are spending thousands of dollars on their display ad network, our fire cleaning services are not found.
Wow, great information. I love sleuthing, it’s so important to research your competition. You have posted some great SEO resources I look forward to using.
I’m sure I read this elsewhere, do you have any citations for the best reputation management strategies?
Just studying it and am getting more SEO tips out of the post again.
Our SEO has really been hurt by the last Google update, hopefully we will do better next time.
Hmmmm, interesting tools that can help us spy on our competitors, especially spyfu.com Thanks.
Investigate new ways to use competitor data to your advantage and you will be at the top of the heap.
I appreciate you for making this information public, I also wrote in the past about about SEO research using Spyfu, opensiteexplorer.org, yahoo site explorer, Blekko.com, tineye and majesticseo.com.
I am genuinely impressed along with the quality of your analysis of competitive intelligence, I wish I was at Pubcon.
This is one of the best writeups of analyzing competitors websites I have seen.
I fully support all efforts to conserve, reuse and recycle website content, we have payroll to make!
I find competitive intelligence to be the most important part of SEO. writing this article exposes holes in other websites marketing strategy.
great article about keyword research, I am new to SEO but learning fast.
I just stumbled upon a tactic for better competitive intelligence, and will be creating an infoproduct on this topic.
I am happy to learn more about competitive intelligence and spying on other websites.