The Open Source Marketer

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