Any savvy business owner knows that it is not enough to do their best – they also need to see what their competitors are doing. There is a wealth of knowledge to be found in the way other players in your niche attract clients, create sales funnels, and design and maintain their websites and their social media presence.
Today we will focus on your competitors’ websites. Apart from the way they look, and the products they contain, what else do you know about these websites? Very little, unfortunately. You don’t know how high they rank on Google, what SEO strategies they use, what reputation they have.
Fortunately, there are various online tools which you can use to find out most of these details. We have picked the most relevant and easy-to-use website analysis tools. They will give you valuable insight about your competitors’ websites and help you redefine your own web development strategy:
- Internet Archive
The Internet Archive has been crawling the World Wide Web and taking snapshots of websites since back in 1996. How does this help you in your endeavour to find out more about your competitors’ websites?
It is simple: by looking at the various stages of development of their website, you can understand how long they’ve been on the market, how they planned they growth and re-branding strategy and how frequently they update their site. This will help you rethink your own website, especially the ongoing maintenance and redesign work. Sometimes, you need to try and be like the Joneses.
- Alexa
Alexa is one of the first website analysis tools and has now grown into a very powerful one, after being acquired by Amazon. With Alexa, you can find out what keywords your competitors rank for, compare your website to that of your competitors’, or compare traffic data between several websites.
The comparison tool between your website and your competitors’ will offer you relevant insights concerning:
- overlapping audiences: people who visit both your site and your competitors’;
- site comparisons in terms of performance for traffic, global rank, page views, reach, etc.;
- website overview: discover your Alexa Rank by comparison to other websites using this tool, measure your traffic and compare all this data to your competitors’;
- top sites: see the relevant numbers in terms of traffic, rank and performance for the top websites in your niche.
- SpyFu
SpyFu costs $79 per month, but it helps you avoid many other unnecessary costs. How? It looks at your competitors’ keywords and AdWords strategies and delivers you in-depth results for what worked and what backfired for them.
Thus, you can avoid making their costly mistakes and can also find inspiration in what worked for them. That’s quite a lot of knowledge to be had for the price, don’t you think?
- Similar Web
Similar Web has a lot to offer in terms of taking a peek behind the curtains of your competitors’ websites. Once you enter their URL, you will get very detailed information concerning:
- their top sources of traffic: banner ads, Google search, social media, etc.;
- detailed breakdown of their traffic: desktop and mobile, average visit duration, pages per visit, bounce rate, etc.;
- audience interests: this option displays other websites visited by the audience in the same browsing session, and their degree of affinity to the website under analysis.
- SEObook
With this tool, you can compare the page titles, meta descriptions, H1, H2 and H3 tags and the relevant key phrases between your website and your competitors’ (you can add more than one). This comparative analysis is helpful if you want to improve your on-page SEO strategy and find other relevant keywords and phrases to rank for.
SEObook also offers other useful tools and extensions such as: SEO toolbar, rank checker, duplicate content checker, keyword comparison tool, and website health check.