Your Favorite Tools for Competitive Analysis?
-
When you review your competitors online presence, what are some of your favorite tools?
I like Open Site Explorer's domain comparison tool. SEMRush is great too but the data is often inaccurate.
-
Totally agree, EGOL.
If you can't beat the competitors content, you don't really deserve to beat them in the rankings. Although it certainly is possible to beat competitors with good links on the short term, it's really hard in the long term.
This being said, if I feel I have (or can create) the content to beat the competitors, I certainly do look at the competitors links to scout for opportunities.
I usually use OSE + the SERP analysis tool (http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty). That's enough to get a good overview of all the good links to the competitors. You can go to Majestic for a larger index, but that will probably only add the links that won't matter much to you anyway.
-
This is for an information site....
I go to Google.com and search for the root keyword that I want to rank for. I look at the top ten sites and ask... "Can I defeat their content?". If "yes" then I attack trying to make content that will be far superior to the best that is out there. I don't look at their links or any other metric, if I can beat their content I jump into the fight.
For a retail site I do the same thing but place house ads on the content page that funnel visitors to pages where I can make money.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Competitive Link building
Hi Folks According to Site Explorer this link ... www.quotationspage.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=12032&p=98500 .... has a page Authority of 42 and a domain Authority of 87. Looking at this it seems to be 3 links embedded in a forum comment. What I would love to understand is... how valuable is this link? (Especially with Panda and Penguin?) ... How do i decide if I should also peruse a similar link for my site? Thank you in advance
Competitive Research | | PHD0 -
Effort for "moderate competition" keywords
I'm rather new to this, and while I'm getting some sense of everything I'm trying to figure out what kind of scope of work lays ahead of me. The keywords I'm looking to rank for are "moderate difficulty" -- somewhere between the 45%-55% "difficulty scale" on seomoz's keyword difficulty report. Assuming I have a number of "A-grade" (according to SEOmoz's reports) optimized pages for these keywords, how many links of a given quality level should I be looking at building up? I mean, of course, the more the better, but if I'm gunning for high DA/PA pages, am I looking at dozens here or hundreds of such links? I can imagine that any answer isn't going to come with much specificity, but if there was just an "idea" of the scale of backlinking involved here, that'd be great!
Competitive Research | | yoni450 -
Tools to search google for sites?
Hi, I am sure I read it on here. But is there a link to a resource whereby I can search Google for sites that accept things like guest bloggers, offer do follow links, do not no follow comments etc... It used things like "search term" blogs, eg "guest bloggers" websute Anyone help me out? Cheers Will
Competitive Research | | YNWA0 -
Competitor analysis
Hi This is obviously a well worn question (I've read the great blog by Sam Crocker last year - see below), but I'm looking for an updated set of opinions on sources of competitor data. The competitor data I'm interested in is traffic volumes either aggregated or disaggregated by referral source (i.e. organic search, PPC, email, social etc.). The types of data I've checked so far are Google Trends for websites (no disaggregation), Alexa (some good sources of free data) and Experian's Hitwise (too expensive for my current needs). In addition I'm aware that Compete will be providing an interface for such data in the UK in January at reasonable rates for what I'm after. I'm interested in views on these and other sources in relation to experience of their relative accuracy, costs, pros, con etc. Ideally I'm looking for something that is free, comprehensive, and is not being used by the competition - is that too much to ask!!! 😉 Any inputs would be greatly appeciated. Thanks in advance! Neil Sam's great blog: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/monitor-competitor-traffic
Competitive Research | | mccormackmorrison0 -
My competition is using 1px images and links without anchor text. Good or bad idea?
I've been scoping out some of my competition and I noticed the number 1 ranking site is doing a lot of "interesting" stuff. I saw a bunch of 1px blank images that they must be using for the alt tag keywords. I also noticed several links to internal pages with different keywords without anchor text so they don't actually appear on the page. Is this considered black hat? Should I be doing something similar? It feels like the work I'm doing to try to rank #1 with a clean/professional looking site are wasted when the #1 sites are doing things like this.
Competitive Research | | technota0 -
Use of competitive kw search software for KW discovery for SEO
I use traditional methods for keyword discovery, but occured to me that perhaps competitive keyword software should be applied to competitor's sites for further possibilitites. Any opinions or experience using this strategy? I know it used primarily for PPC, but value for SEO KW discovery? Any personal recommendations on which programs considered most effective? Thanks. Alan
Competitive Research | | ahw0 -
Keyword difficulty tool - bit confused here!!
Hi, Got a question about the keyword difficulty tool, I'm new to seomoz so might be a silly question but here goes. Q: It takes the top 10 results from Google under a certain search query, the results displayed gives a rough breakdown of what power the page on the search results has along with the root domain. It looks like it rewards the best out of the bunch for each section with a tick, so 1 tick per column for the best performer. Now I would have thought if one of the websites in the top 10 had all 4 ticks it would rank at the top of the list but this is not the case. What else would come into play to make others which have no ticks rank higher then one which has all. Sorry if this sounds really confusing.
Competitive Research | | activitysuper0 -
Anyone have experience with "Link Research Tools" ?
I'm looking into Linkresearchtools.com for competitive backlink analysis. Already have SEOmoz (obviously) and Majestic. Anyone have any experience with the toolset? If so, what does it do well, what do you like, and where does it fall down? Cheers
Competitive Research | | BedeFahey0