Sazbean

We’ve been discussing tools to use to find out how your competitors are doing on their websites and how your customers and competitors seem to know so much about your website. Last week we covered one tool for getting information about other websites – Alexa. This week, we’ll take a look at another similar tool – Compete.

Compete is very similar to Alexa in that it uses a toolbar installed in the web browser to generate estimates and statistics about various websites. Similarities really end there, as Compete is a paid service, and provides much more information that just estimates about a site’s traffic. A trial account starts with 5 free credits and various reports cost different amounts of credits (the ones I tried seemed to either be 1 credit or 4 credit).

Site Analytics – This service is similar to Alexa (estimates using a toolbar) and allows you to compare up to 5 websites at once in terms of Visitors (People Counts – Monthly, Rank – Monthly, Visits – Monthly), Engagement (Attention – Daily, Attention – Monthly, Average Stay – Monthly, Pages/Visit – Monthly), and Growth (Velocity – Daily). Unfortunately, unless your website (or that of your competitor) has quite a bit of traffic, these are very rough estimates.

Search Analytics – This is the more useful of Compete’s services – Site Referrals, Keyword Destination, and Compare Sites.

1. Site Referrals – lets you see what keywords are sending traffic to a website, as well as the site share, keyword engagement and keyword effectiveness for each. The top 50 keywords will cost 1 credit, and the rest of the report will cost more (mine was 4 credits for 243 keywords). This can be very useful both for optimizing your website and for adwords. Use this on your competitors websites to find keywords to use on your own site, or ones that are not in use for Google AdWords campaigns. If you run this report again other on the day you originally ran it, it will cost you additional credits.
2. Keyword Destination – gives you the top sites that get a click from a particular keyword as well as information about the keyword share, site share, and average monthly search referrals. Use this tool to find who your competitors are on particular keywords, especially if you advertise using Google AdWords.
3. Compare Sites – compare two websites in terms of keywords which are ranked with keyword volume advantage and engagement advantage. This tool would be useful after you’ve optimized your website to see how well your efforts stack up against your competitors (at least in terms of keyword searches).

Cost – You start with 5 free credits which you’ll use fairly quickly (just one or two reports). Reports seem to range from 1 credit for partial reports to 4 credits for full results. To purchase additional credits (bonuses included at higher amounts): $25 for 10, $45 for 45, $100 for 110, $500 for 560.

Summary – Compete is a good tool to use if you are heavily using Google AdWords to drive traffic to your site and if keyword optimization is very important to you. If you do decide to use a Search Engine Optimization firm, spend a few bucks to use this tool before and after to see how well they did (remember you may need to wait a few months afterwards for the keyword traffic to actually increase). Best of all, you can play with some of the basics for free and pay going forward for when you actually need their keyword services.

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