We all understand the importance of conducting competitive analysis before taking on an SEO project. Although there are a variety of new methods available to perform analysis I generally stick to my basic tried and true methods provided by the search engine and keyword analysis tools, and I still perform old fashion research like in the old days based on filtered title and anchor searches.
Compete.com
Track your online competition with this new competition analysis tool made available by Compete. With this tool you can get keywords referring visitors to your online competition and compare it to your own site. You can research the monthly and annual traffic referral growth rate of your competition. And you can run reports that reflect the most referred domains based on keyword searches.
Accuracy of Compete.com
I ran a few keyword analysis reports for sites I’m very familiar with and have some conflicting results in comparison to other data I have collected during past projects. Although the tool does reflect data of larger sites it only estimates data for smaller less trafficked sites, and therefore does not provide a reliable measurement of data that I’d feel comfortable relying on. I also noticed large discrepancies when comparing the data to the actual analytics of my clients sites. And as far as the report that reflects the most referred domains based on keywords, these results made no sense to me at all based on the alternative research I’ve done.
Even though I wasn’t too excited over this tool I did find some of the information accurate and helpful, and I would suggest giving it a try if you are conducting your own competitive research and are just simply curious like I was. But I’m still very hopeful that someday a tool will arrive on the scene that is comparable with the information I discover when using my old school conventional approaches. I’m somewhat hopeful that someday the Compete.com tool might be that tool.
Comments on this entry are closed.