Metrics lack all value if you don’t have a baseline. Comparing your own website over time is great, but it can only get you so far. Inevitably, you want to know if the numbers your site is putting up are good or bad.
But, sadly, most companies don’t exactly publically publish their Google Analytics for you to peruse at your leisure.
Here are five tools you can use to see what’s going on with your competitors.
1. Topsy Social Analytics
Topsy is a social analytics tools that lets you compare social media profiles of various companies.
It’s basically a search engine, but for social media and in real time. You can structure your searches by time, look only for tweets, photos, videos, links, or influencers, or just search for everything.
What’s even better is that, because it’s a search engine, it’s got an advanced search function. With the same basic format as Twitter advanced search, you can look up how many links are going to various domains, and what those links are. Over time, you get a much clearer picture not only of how much sharing is going on, but what’s being shared.
You can also compare your own to your competitors’ Twitter accounts in beautiful line graphs, giving you a clear idea of volume of social traffic as well.
2. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a robust website crawler that is designed to evaluate your site for SEO problems like duplicate pages, keyword mishaps, meta descriptions, etc. It’s a very robust tool.
And you can evaluate any site you want! Just drop the URL in and you’re all set.
There are lots of ways you can use this mountain of data to get a little cozier with your competitors, but here are just two to get you going:
- Find their most valuable webpages. Companies will link internal pages to their most valuable content. By looking at which pages have the most internal inlinks (links from other pages within a site to a specific page, so linking from one blog post to another) you can see what page they’re trying to drive traffic to.
- Find out what keywords your competitors are going for. By looking at the meta keyword data, you can find out what they’re aiming to rank for.
3. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a great tool to see what competing content is getting traction across social shares. Just enter their URL and you can see their top content ranked by total social shares.
Like Topsy, it’s basically a search engine, which means advanced search capabilities. That way, you can really drill into whatever data you need. For example, want to know what blog posts for a particular product did well and which ones didn’t? You can look that up.
Buzzsumo also has a paid service that gives you some extra add-ons, most importantly backlink analysis of whoever you’re searching. This is invaluable information when you’re developing your own backlink strategy, and gives you a much more comprehensive picture of the value of a competitor’s webpage.
4. Alexa
Alexa is probably the best known tool for this sort of work. And with good reason – it’s one of the most comprehensive free tools out there for website evaluation. Aside from their global ranking function, they also offer (for free!):
- Bounce rate, daily page views per visitor, and daily time on site
- Percentage of visitors coming from search engines
- The top five keywords
- What sites are visited right before they hit whatever site you’ve looked up
- Total number of sites that link in (and what the top five actually are)
All in all, there’s a pile of information that you can glean from Alexa for nothing. Of course, you can get even more for the $10/month they charge for a subscription.
5. Compete
Of all these tools, Compete is definitely the prettiest. Sleek and simple to use, it’s a great UI. And it only gets better. Compete lets you look at unique visitors, traffic sources, and related sites.
But their best feature is that you can compare websites to each other. This gives you a clear snapshot of where you sit compared to your biggest competitors.
Summary
Part of having a successful website is knowing if your website is successful. And you’ll never know unless you have at least a partial idea of how your competition is doing.
Research on what’s going on with other people’s web traffic is the best way to know if you’re on track or not.
And who knows – maybe your numbers will blow the competition out of the water.
