Spy on Your Competitors

Photo by tanakawho

Did you know that, for a small price, you can find out what keywords are sending the most traffic to your competitors?

I have been re-reading Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, since I have not read it for a while, and he just released an updated version. It is really nice that he gives purchasers of his book free updates. It’s a great reference book for SEO and other internet business topics.

Anyway, in the SEO Book, Aaron mentions Compete.com. They track visitors to websites. In a way, they are similar to Alexa, but they have better data. Compete gets their data from Internet Service Providers, while Alexa gets their data from Alexa toolbar users, so Alexa is skewed toward webmasters, who are more likely to have the toolbar installed.

There is some free information on the site, but you can also buy data, such as the top keywords that people use to find your competitor’s sites. You can buy 10 credits for $20. (I haven’t bought any credits yet, because they give you 5 free credits when you sign up.)

It costs 1 or 2 credits to get the top 50 keywords for a site. I tried spying on a few of my favorite blogs, and it only cost me 1 credit each. I thought the results were very interesting.

It not only gives you the keywords, but it gives some idea of which keywords are most useful. It shows which keywords resulted in the visitor staying for a longer time on the site.

Just think of the possibilities this tool can provide.

One thing I learned is that certain blogs get a lot more search engine traffic than others. Some of the blogs have such stupid terms as their top referrers that they are probably getting more traffic from sources other than search engines.

On the other hand, some blogs are doing a great job of targeting relevant keywords.

The blog that seemed to be doing best on attracting traffic through keywords only had 4.5% of their traffic from the top keyword, and that was the name of the blog. The next keyword only sent 1.4% of the traffic.

I think the lesson to be learned from that, is that you need to target a lot of different keywords in order to get a lot of traffic. A single keyword will not bring you much.

Have you used Compete before?