Competitive Research Tools
October 1st, 2009
Overview: These are free and paid tools which will help you determine how large a competitor’s traffic stream is, and which search terms are sending them the most traffic. Watch this video for a brief introduction to using the following tools.
Competitive research tools can help you find a baseline for what to do, but some companies that focus on the competition too much instead of adding value to their offerings actually end up destroying their own profit margins.
General Competitive Research Tools
- Alexa – shows traffic trends for competing websites. Alexa has a heavy webmaster bias that is nowhere near as noticeable at Compete or Quantcast.
- Compete.com – shows you traffic trends for competing websites. Allows you to compare sites head to head. Also offers a paid search analytics tool which is both exceptionally useful and affordably priced.
- Quantcast – shows site traffic and demographic trends and details. Also allows you to download a list of their top 1,000,000 websites.
- Google Trends for Websites – free tool from Google showing traffic estimates, visitor country location, top 10 related websites, and top 10 related keywords. Only returns data for fairly high traffic websites though.
- Google Search Insights – shows keyword trends, hot keywords by cateogry, and top geographic regions for a keyword.
- Archive.org – see how old a website is and what it looked like in the past
- DomainTools – see Whois data and how many times a domain has changed hands
- SearchStatus – highlights nofollow links, shows PageRank, shows Alexa rank, and provides links to some backlink information
- Xinu – lists some SEO related data plus more general web related data points like Alexa ranking and Del.icio.us bookmarks.
Paid Competitive Research Tools
- Compete.com Search Analytics – low cost competitive tool showing keywords that send competing sites the most traffic.
- HitWise – similar to Compete.com Search Analytics, but costs about $10,000 and up.
- KeyCompete – shows keywords that competitors are buying
- KeywordSpy – similar to KeyCompete, but with more data – including cached ad copy and affiliate data
- SEMPhonic – tracks keyword rankings and provides competitive reporting
- SpyFu – shows terms that competitors are buying or ranking for in the organic search results.
- Trellian Competitive Intelligence – shows keywords that competitors rank for and keywords that send them significant traffic.
SEO Related General Competitive Research Tools
- IndexRank – scores how well your site is getting indexed in Google compared with related sites.
- SearchRascal – shows the top 10 rankings in Google and other major search engines, and tracks how the rankings have changed over the past day, week, or month. RankPulse offers a similar service, but for a smaller set of keywords.
- SEMRush – newer tool from the folks who made SEO Digger. Also adds data like keyword value and keyword volume. Full SEM Rush review here.
- SEOMoz Trifecta – estimates how strong a page is based on inbound links, age, PageRank, etc. Grabs some of the similar datapoints that SEO for Firefox grabs.
- SpyderMate – web based tool that looks for on site SEO issues and returns backlink information.
- URLTrends – shows a sample of keywords that a site ranks for using a database somewhat smaller than SEODigger
Research the Competition’s Keyword Strategy
View our keyword research tools section, or use some of the following free tools to get a view of their keyword strategy.
- Keyword Density Analysis Tool – finds common words and phrases on your site, or competing websites.
- Page Comparison Tool – tool compares the page titles, meta information, and most common two and three word phrases between different pages.
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