Look at your website competitors, if you want your site to be better. Don`t think spying on your competitors is being lazy or copying someone else’s work. It helps you in making your website better. Is this some kind of duplicate? No, this is inspiring yourself to create your own unique brand. It is the best way to discover new trends and making your website bigger, better, faster, smarter, more creative than the competition.
When looking at different pages you can find sources of inspiration unexpectedly.
You view a site and you think how cool it is and you would love to learn how to do the same. However, before you start digging through your JavaScript, you should first check to see if a plugin or maybe even a theme was behind the feature. It might be an inspiring trend you want to get.
Don`t be scared of using new plugins or themes. If a developer you know and trust released it, then you might consider installing a brand new plugin. If you don’t know the developer, you can check if a website you trust uses that new plugin on their site. That might be enough to convince you to test the waters with it as well.
Spying brings you benefits, but don`t stop educating yourself. Search for new inspirations by visiting your competitors. Create your own, extraordinary product which gives you the key to success.
Let’s have a look at different aspects of digital marketing and criteria for evaluating website competitors:
Keyphrases and Search Engine Rankings
Check what your website competitors rank for and how high this will give you ideas for content and key phrases straight away. You don’t have to use a tool, to find this information just search for every conceivable keyphrase.
Pay Per Click and Digital Advertising
Similar to organic rankings, watching an opponent’s ad spending will give you insights into what might be a good investment for you. Presuming they have well-managed, well-optimized campaigns, you can see which words and phrases are getting traction with your target audience.
Check Your Website Competitors Authority and Link Popularity
The next step in the analysis of SEO competition concerns links. Sites with links from many other websites have much higher authority, especially if the links are from sites that have high authority themselves.
The original metric of authority is Google’s own “PageRank” but they no longer share this data. So these tools offer proxy metrics. Beyond the number, you can use these reports to find PR opportunities. If a media site or blog has mentioned and linked to a competitor, it may be a good site to pitch to yourself!
Link popularity data sources of website competitors
There are many tools that track links and provide authority metrics. Below you can find 5 most popular examples:
1. MOZ: Domain Authority;
2. SEMrush: Domain Score;
3. Alexa: Competitive Power;
4. Ahrefs: Domain Rating;
5. Searchmetrics: Page Strength.
Social Media
It’s not easy to analyze social accounts but easy to watch them. At a glance, you can see which specific posts are getting engagement, but the big picture is impossible to see without tools. The inquiry is very useful and includes an idea for what to write about, where to be active and who to collaborate with.
Traffic
There are no tools that will give you an accurate look at their Analytics, but there are ways to get website traffic estimates. These tools give you a big picture, top-line look into who is getting more visitors when they visit, demographics and behaviour data.
Example of 9 traffic tools:
1. Google Analytics
2. Quantcast
3. Google Website Optimizer/Visual Website Optimizer
4. ClickTale
5. Google Webmaster Tools
6. RankTracker
7. SEO Spyglass
8. Market Samurai
9. Ahrefs
Technology
Website technology is always very visible, and there are tools that make it easy to check exactly what’s giving power to your competitors’ website and what tools and plugins are connected. This gives you visibility into what tactics they’re likely using and what might work for you as well.
