Ever wonder what your competitors’ top keywords are? Would you like to know if your competition is down in traffic the same times of year you are? I’m sure you wish you could find out how many unique visitors your top competitors are receiving.
With Compete.com you can get all of this information and more. This is not a sponsored post by the way! I knew of Compete.com when I first began doing paid search and SEO for clients, but just now have I really begun to use it and actually do something with the information.
So what is Compete.com? Compete.com is a website statistic analysis tool. However, you don’t just use it for you own site, the main purpose is to compare your website to your top competitors – hence the name, compete.com!
The free version of Compete.com gives you plenty of information that you can use to help enhance your PPC campaigns, but to also gain a better understanding of how your competitors are doing in the present economy.
While I enjoy seeing visitor data and traffic increases/decreases for my top competitors in comparison to my own site, it’s the keyword information Compete.com gives you that I get the most use out of.
When you go to Compete.com, there is an option to compare sites. At the top of the page you should see 5 white open field boxes in which you can enter your website, as well as 4 of your top competitor websites. Here’s a tip, don’t include the https://www. Just enter the site name without the prefix for best results.
Once you enter your websites, click ‘go’, Compete.com will then produce a graphical representation of your site visitor statistics in comparison to your competitor site visitor statistics. Here you can see who’s on top and who’s on bottom – which is pretty cool info to have. But that’s not even the most useful part. If you scroll down, you can get even more detailed information about your site in comparison to the other sites. To the far left, there is a top search terms column. Here you can see your sites top search terms but also your competitors! I think this is a great way to find and add additional keywords into your PPC campaign to target. If you click on a specific keyword, you can get the sites that drove a majority of visitors via that keyword.
Other information will include the monthly normalized unique visitor stats for each site, the monthly percentage change of unique visitors, yearly change, as well as top referring sites, top destination sites and if available top tags.
The top referral sites are a great bit of information too. If you find that most of your competitors are getting a lot of traffic from another search engine, perhaps you could add PPC for that search engine too and increase traffic/leads for your own site.
It’s also great to see how well or poorly you are doing in comparison to other sites in the same industry. Seeing the yearly change of visitors tells me I’ve made great strides over the past year (if positive) and to keep doing what I’m doing. And the unique visitors tell me I’m dominating the search engines results pages via PPC and SEO.
There are many more tools and bits of information you can get out of Compete.com just by playing around with the features. I’d highly recommend creating a free account and use the free features to help gain more insight into your competition and to find additional keywords to add to your PPC account.
