Mr Ploppy’s Monday Tool List Volume XXXIV - Competitive Research Tools Revisted - Stuntdubl

Mr Ploppy’s Monday Tool List Volume XXXIV - Competitive Research Tools Revisted

Filed under: General, Business Issues, Tools, Mr. Ploppy by Stuntdubl SEO at 11:35 pm, 1/29/2006

I did some competitive tools a while back with competitive analysis and keyword tools, but I think the idea of competitive analysis is key to the natural search engine optimization space and is worth revisiting. Understanding your industry from an online perspective is critical to the success of an SEO campaign. There are a lot of tools to better understand your competitors available, and it is definitely worthwhile to use them to your advantage.

Competitive Analysis Tools

Firefox User Agent Extension - detect user-agent based cloaking
User agents for import to firefox UA switcher extension
SwitchProxy extension for firefox combine with a list from OpenProxies to do your research.
Espion by WG
Google News/Web alerts
Yahoo News Alerts
WeBuildPages Cool SEO Tool
Alexa Traffic Rankings and traffic estimator
Yahoo Site Explorer
WebGuerrilla’s Tattler Tool
SEObook Super Keyword Analysis Tool
ROI-team free tools
Sitescore - find out what’s right and wrong with your competitor’s site
Copernic tracker - track changes to a site (free demo - $50)
Watchthatpage - free page watcher
Website Watcher (free trial - 50euro)
Touchgraph - for identifying linking relationships
Xenu link sleuth - great for a multitude of things - spider their site and see what you find
Googspy
Complete Whois
Whois.sc
SEOMoz KW difficulty tool
SEOlogs KW difficulty tool
Blogosophere tracking tools by SEObook
Digital Point backlink tracker - track competitor backlinks and pages indexed over time
Creative site search queries - site:competitorsitehere.com “fun and exciting terms” - try thinking like these guys
Where the bots can go - peak at yourcompetitiorsite.com/robots.txt

Questions from the competitor analysis form on Entrepreneur.com

Where is your competitor located?
What are your competitor’s annual sales?
Who are the major managers and members of the board?
Is the company owned or in partnership with any other corporations?
What are the competitor’s strengths?
What are their weaknesses?
What is the company’s product line?
How do the products compare to yours, in terms of functionality, appearance and any other criteria?
What is their price structure?
What are the company’s marketing activities?
What are the company’s supply sources for products?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of their sales literature?
Is the company expanding or cutting back?
Ten more competitive analysis questions

To these I would add:

What does your competitor rank for?
Where are the getting links?
Where are they getting their link power?
How old is their site?
Do they have a network of sites?
What viral marketing methods have they used?
How large is their site? (how many actual pages?
Do they have an affiliate program?
How large is their affiliate program?
Does their affiliate program pass link popularity?
Do they use other methods of promotion?
Do they use offline advertising?
How well known is their brand?
What do they do better than you?
What are their SEM strengths?
What could be better about their SEM campaign?
What pay-per-click keywords are they biding on?

Competitive Analysis Discussion and Resources

I usually don’t throw in the sales pitch, but I figured I would today. I offer a money back guarantee on the web marketing competitive analysis report that is the first step for any retainer based We Build Pages clients (and I enjoy doing them).

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