The first two legal “spy” tools we have discussed, Google Trends and Quantcast, have proven to be useful in supplying valuable information you can use to enhance your online marketing efforts. Since Google Trends give you the, well, trends of the online habits of your competitor’s audience and Quantcast gives you the demographics they belong to. Now, we will introduce another essential tool you can use – Alexa. It is known for its capability of ranking websites based on their traffic flow.
First, go to www.alexa.com and key in your competition’s website address in the search box. Immediately, you will be supplied with this information:
- That website’s traffic rank on Alexa
- Its traffic rank in the whole United States
- How many other websites are linked to that website
You can also click on the “Get details” button to find out more detailed data. Sample of such information would be:
- An overview of
- the products or services they offer
- percentage of their traffic that is derived from search engines
- how long has their website been in up and running
- demographics of their visitors
- average time how long does each visitor stays on each page and the whole site in total
- Detailed analysis of these categories:
- Traffic statistics: You will know where their traffic comes from.
- Search keywords: Know the top search terms that drive traffic to the website from the search engines
- Demographics: Know the group of their most popular audience by age, gender, race, education, location, etc.
- Contact details: Discover who owns the website, their contact information and company size.
- Reviews: Get to see both the good and bad reviews the site has.
- Related links: See the link network they have made
- Clickstream: Know the sites visitors go to before visiting your competition’s site (upstream) and the sites they visited after that (downstream)
Are you surprised with how useful this three-part “spying” series is? Given the information you will have by using Google Trends, Quantcast and Alexa, you will be able to see your own website’s strong points and weaknesses compared to your competitors’. Now, take everything that is good and relevant and make the most efficient and effective website you can!
These may be too much for you to digest? Let me help you. Contact me now!
