If you want to know how much website traffic a competitor is getting then you’ll want to take a look at Compete.com. Compete offers site analytic that let you do side by side website traffic comparisons between several sites. Compete also offers search analytics that can tell you what keywords a specific website is getting traffic for or what websites in general are getting traffic for specific keywords.

Here’s how the Compete website describes their Search Analytics, “It’s your starting point to build and optimize search marketing campaigns that create brand awareness, drive site traffic and increase sales. Use Compete Search Analytics to discover keywords driving traffic to any domain, identify gaps in your search strategy, invest in terms that drive the most engaged visitors, and track your performance against competitors and peers.”

Compete offers a great service that really puts important information in your hands. I personally like the site comparison tool because you can begin to get a rough idea of how sites are doing compared to each other in terms of traffic. You can use this information either as a benchmark for your current competitive efforts or you can use it as a gauge to research a market or plan strategies for acquiring visitor traffic.

The service offers some bare bones free information, but if you really want to dig into the keyword research, you’ll need to buy some Compete credits. Credits are purchased with real money and each report deducts a few credits from your overall balance. The system seems to be very fair.

I received free trial credits when I created a free account and the overall theme seemed to be that the more potential valuable you stand to gain from a report, the more credits it will cost you.

Perspective:

Gaining insight into what is going on with websites in your topic of interest is as much a necessity of picking a direction as it is a part of trying to gain a competitive edge.

While compete is not a complete picture of everything that is happening with a competitors website, it is a lot better than not knowing anything at all.

Combined with keyword research tools like WordTracker and Google Trends, Compete can be a very useful tool in your research toolbox.

Competing,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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Today’s Microtween is on TwitterScan.com. TwitterScan lets you research Twitter posts using keyword searches. You can research just a particular keyword, like “Obama”, or you can search for keywords by user. This is extremely helpful if you want to see what people are saying about a particular subject or if you want to track what a person is saying on a specific topic.

Depending on your keywords you can pull back some interesting results. For example if you put in the search phrase “darren rowse” you can see all the things that are said about him. Run that through some more analysis and you might find a trend.

TwitterScan even provides an RSS option so you can subscribe to a Twitter search result. Personally I think that is genius because it invites others to use the site like a service, which should promote usage and build value.

They also provide a search engine plugin that lets you put the TwitterScan search in your toolbar. This is handy if you switch between the various search engines like I do.

Perspective:

Twitter is growing exponentially and like all social networking tools it is still maturing. How to effectively use Twitter is still undefined for some and clearly defined for others. One thing is clear though, because conversations on Twitter are public and searchable, there will continue to be growing interest in search, indexing, analyzing and reporting on what is said on Twitter. There is definitely some potential market gold in the data and in the next few Microtweens you and I will look at the tools that will help us dig into that data.

Twitter Scanning,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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In the last post we watched a video about keyword and keyword phrase research. We saw the combined use of WordTracker and Google Trends to come up with a method to find high search volume, low competition keywords and keyword phrases. In this next video we see the concept taken a step further with the use of the regular Google search.

Overall this quick hit method is a low cost way to dig into keyword and keyword phrases. It’s good to have ways to quickly test ideas without spending lots of valuable time on a concept. Since Google and WordTracker are already tapping into existing data you are much more likely to get a fairly accurate picture of what keywords are doing.

Give the video a squint and let me know what you think in the blog comments.

Dreaming up new stuff,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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Keyword research is an extremely important part of optimizing blogs and understanding what words or phrases to use in blog posts or articles. Today’s post is a quick hit on combining WordTracker’s Keyword Tool and Google Trends to come up with a reasonable estimation for potential keyword search traffic.

Here is a video from the guys over at the Thirty Day Challenge that highlights some of the issues you need to consider when doing keyword research. The video also points out some good ways to correlate keyword data into a better visualization of historical visitor traffic for a given set of keyword s or keyword phrases.

Try the WordTracker Free Keyword Tool for yourself and see what results come back for your keywords of choice. You will be surprised at what you can find. However, as the video explains, you need a reasonable way to estimate the real long term potential for search traffic. Pit your keyword or keyword phrase against some long term trends using Google Trends.

The WordTracker keyword tool was a big help to me when I wanted to optimize one of my sites. Using the tool I was able to discover people really were not searching for the keywords I thought they were. It helped me to understand what was really being searched for and I was able to tweak the keywords on my site to match. Although the overall change was small, the increase in traffic from using the right keywords was measurable literally overnight. The project now get regular search visitors for the keywords and keywords phrases that is was not getting before.

While I didn’t use Google Trends at the time to cross reference the keywords search history, I did use Google’s adsense keyword tool to get an idea of adsense competition versus general search traffic. This gave me a rough estimate of what to expect for my keywords and keyword phrases. The adsense keyword tool is not nearly as easy to understand visually and it doesn’t give you the big historical picture that Google Trends does, but it does give you the adsense competition for keywords and phrases so a combination of all three tools might not be a bad thing.

Just remember, a little research up front can save you a lot of time and effort later on.

Keep on keeping on,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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