Investigating tops of the search delivery we think about secret reasons of the competitors' success quite often - why this or that site is loved by the users, brings sales, calls and addresses of visitors? The competitive investigation will help us to understand mechanisms of success.
Each successful web-project is to solve three strategic tasks:
- To involve the visitor
- To keep him/her
- To force him/her to do the necessary action
And if it's simple enough to determine how the successful site manages to keep visitors and to force them to make commercially useful actions (design, information structure, usability of the project as a whole and separate elements in particular, follow-up mechanisms, etc.), it's sometimes rather difficult to understand where the traffic comes from and why. And namely, this is a question of the given article by the example of the English-speaking projects analysis.
It is possible to mark out three external sources of the traffic:
- Search
- Context
- Hits from other sites
In this connection we are interested in the following data:
- Key words on which competitors promote
- On what methods (read: references) they promote, how difficult it is to overtake them
- What domains are internal network of the competitor's sites
- What key words and budget they use in contextual advertising
- And, at last, what type of traffic they receive and where they receive it from
Key words on which competitors promote
In the subject "software development" one of the leading Belarusian outsourcing companies EffectiveSoft (www.effectivesoft.com) has achieved certain success in the search promotion; let's try to find out on what key words they focus on in their work.
First, we can determine on what popular word-combinations the above-stated site takes places in the top of Google search delivery. For this purpose we'll use Seodigger service (www.seodigger.com):
Figure1. SeoDigger.com Analysis
So, we can safely say that EffectiveSoft Company is guided by the following key phrases at the search promotion:
- Software development
- Software programming
- Custom software development
- Custom programming
- Software outsourcing
- Outsourcing software development
etc.
To specify the picture of requests' priority is possible at the next stage.
The analysis of the link profile of the competitor
The formula links = positions = visitors is well-known, therefore, the qualitative information on the link profile of the competitor is difficult to be overestimated. The detailed information on links can be received with the help of CS Yazzle program (www.yazzle.ru):
Figure 2. Link profile analysis
CS Yazzle allows to see what key words are priority for the researched project (it's enough to sort links on the "Text of the link" field and to compare their quantity and quality for various groups of requests), to determine whether the project buys the links and if yes, which ones, whether there are external links which are difficult to receive (links from the sites of universities, state organizations, mentions on news sites of New York Times class, etc.).
It is also possible to determine promotion methods of the experimental: if the main page is promoted only or other pages are promoted too, if the subject exchange is conducted or non-subject links are used, if semantic nucleus is processed with short or long texts of links and so on.
Internal network of the competitor's sites
The internal network of the sites allows saving money for links purchase, however, it demands from the companies engaged in promotion a definite caution, as more often such sites-satellites have minimum useful information and are unworthy of being found in the delivery of the search engines. How is it possible to try to calculate resources of the internal network?
Besides other characteristics, CS Yazzle program determines IP addresses and names of people the referring domain is registered on. If we see the group of the domains referring on the required one, and they all registered on the same owner as the main one, the internal network is present.
It is also necessary to pay attention to domains from one IP or block of IP addresses. Many hosters allow to place some domains on one account and many companies use the given opportunity to save money.
Many companies, not wishing to stick their neck out, buy up or develop their own satellites; however, they do not put the links on the main domain from them, using them basically for exchange. What is possible to be done?
The site DomainTools (www.domaintools.com) comes to the aid, allowing carrying out the search according to the information on registration of domains.
Figure 3. Internal network resources definition
For a small payment the given report can be bought and used in work.
An excellent tool of competitive analysis is … Google. First of all, we need to find one domain got by our competitor. It is possible to determine whether it is bought by date of registration and by the changes of the owner's information, all this information can be received on DomainTools site.
The next stage is the search in Google for adverts of the given domain sale. In 90 % of cases the search leads us on the forum DigitalPoint, in the section Buy, Sell or Trade - Domains (www.forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php? f=59). Having found the buyer, it is possible to find all his messages, his contact information according to which to determine his activity at other stock exchanges of domain names and forums; the opportunities are practically boundless.
We've sorted out with the search traffic, however, if the competitor actively uses contextual advertising?
The information on pay per click campaign of the competitor
A great service SpyFu (www.spyfu.com) will help us to determine activity of the competitor in the field of context advertising. Having entered the domain name we receive, besides the information on visibility in the search results on requests (as in SeoDigger), the estimated budget and, the thing that interests us first of all, the list of key words on which the advert is compiled (for a small payment it is possible to receive the full list).
Figure 4 Analysis of context campaigns
It is necessary to make a special emphasis that comparison of the service data with the data of Google AdWords account has shown that SpyFu determines the order of the budget correctly.
The information on the most active competitors is also useful both in the field of search promotion and in the context. It is quite possible that you will see new players there about whose existence you didn't even suspect earlier.
The last moment we would like to talk about is the analysis of the search traffic received by the competitor.
The involved traffic analysis
Unfortunately, nobody will show us exact statistics, however, we're able to take and analyze some information.
Nevertheless, before investigating the estimated data of foreign services, it is necessary to see if there is server or other statistics in the open access? Owners of the sites frequently forget to close server statistics from indexation.
For example, the search in Google on the request "travel allintitle:Usage Statistics" (to show pages on the travel subject, containing in Meta-Title the word Usage Statistics) has returned about 40 results with server statistics of the tourist sites which use popular script Webalizer for calculation of the statistics, in particular, of the site Hotel-online.com having significant audience.
Figure 5 Server statistics is a mine of information
To find server statistics of the successful competitor is equal to finding the treasure. The information which becomes accessible to us:
- The information on hits to the site and viewings of the pages (the ratio of hits to viewings will also allow to determine quality of the audience)
- Points of entrance on the site
- Hits from referring sites
- Geographical belonging of visitors
- The information on the search phrases.
For example, for November, 2007 the following has been done:
- 9928 hits on the request bora bora
- 1060 on the request atlantis
- 766 on the request hotel online, etc.
Having compared the positions in the delivery with the transferred traffic we can receive rather exact information on quantity of users who can be involved from the search on these or those key phrases.
If you didn't succeed in receiving the server statistics, it is necessary to address to services of the traffic estimation Alexa.com and Compete.com allowing to receive the idea about the order of the involved traffic, geography of users, ratio of visits to quantity of viewings and to compare trends of attendance for several resources.
Alexa Service takes the information from its own toolbar, rather widespread in the West; Compete.com gets the data basically from the logs of Internet-providers of the USA.
Alexa shows only rating; Compete also gives provisional numerical values (the distortion of the data with Google Analytics statistics on one of our client sites is about in 5 times smaller).
Thus, using Alexa and Compete data it is possible to receive only survey information on the nature of the involved traffic.
Conclusions
The Web allows to receive incredible amount of invaluable information on competitors, and competently carried out competitive investigation at the stage of leading business in online and preparations to its promotion will allow to exclude unessential mistakes and to keep your money from unjustified charges.
It is also necessary to remember that competitors, if they wish, can also collect significant volume of the information about our online-business, therefore, it is necessary to secure the confidential information as much as possible and not to lose vigilance. It is the Internet, in fact!
