E-media Strategist : 3 Favorite (and Free) Online Competitive Analysis Tools
Use these sites to keep tabs on your competition.
December 2008 By Eric Shanfelt
2. Search Engine Saturation—MarketLeap.com
If you’re going to succeed online, you need to know how high your site ranks in the search engines. I have found a direct relationship to the number of pages indexed in the search engines and the traffic that a site generates. The metric used to measure the number of pages indexed in the search engines is called search engine saturation. You can find this by going to each of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and entering special search phrases for each site in which you’re interested. But there’s an easier way.
My favorite tool for search engine saturation is MarketLeap.com. Its Search Engine Saturation report lets you compare up to five sites and see how many pages each site has listed in the major search engines. See how well your site stacks up to your competitors’ and cross-reference this with the competitive traffic that you see in Compete.com. Search engine saturation can be a major factor in how much traffic your site generates.
MarketLeap also has a free tool called Link Popularity, which checks how many links come from other sites to yours. Inbound links are critical to building traffic from other sites, as well as improving your site’s ranking in the search engines.
3. Search Engine Spend Monitoring—SpyFu.com
More media sites are spending money to acquire traffic or drive sales, especially if they have paid content or rely heavily upon registration. Just enter a competitor’s domain, and SpyFu will give you an estimate of that competitor’s paid search ad spend, how many clicks it is receiving, the average cost per click, average ad position, and the top organic and paid keywords that drive traffic to its site. Of course, you’ll need to make your own decisions on whether to spend money on driving traffic to your site or to help sell your information products, but it’s interesting to see what your competitors are doing.
There has been criticism of SpyFu’s range of error for paid ad spend, but as a free tool, it still provides good intelligence.
SpyFu also has a unique, free (and fun) report called SpyFu Kombat. This allows you to pick two sites (and a third site if you’re a paid member) and see how their paid keyword campaigns overlap. You can see which keywords your competitor is targeting that you’re not and vice versa.
There are many other free tools available to help media companies develop their online business. E-mail me at Eric@eMediaStrategist.com and tell me what free tools you like to use. Perhaps I’ll share some of them in a future column.
Eric Shanfelt is executive vice president of eMedia for Aspire Media. He previously served as senior vice president of eMedia for Penton Media and as an industry consultant helping more than a dozen b-to-b and consumer media companies grow their online media businesses. Shanfelt’s extensive e-media background spans 17 years, and he specializes in practical revenue-generating strategies for publishers. He maintains a blog at www.eMediaStrategist.com.
