Within a well-written business plan is an assessment of the competitive landscape in which your business operates. Even if you are not seeking funding, wouldn’t you like to know how your competitors are doing, and possibly, how you can jump ahead? I would hope that you are using Google Analytics to understand how your own site or blog are doing with respect to who is visiting your site and what they’re looking at. What if you could get this same information on your competitors, without feeling like a stalker?
Enter Alexa.com. Alexa was started over 20 years ago in San Francisco. It was acquired in 1999 by Amazon. By going to www.alexa.com, you can enter your competitor’s web address and within a few clicks, you will see their global traffic rank (even for low volume sites), 6 months of traffic history, the top five referring sites, the top five search terms (keywords) and even the demographics of their visitors (gender, education level, and browsing location).
You can use this knowledge about their most effective keywords if they’re relevant to your business too! Confirm, using Google’s Keyword Planner tool, that the keywords are being searched at a compelling volume in your geographic region. Then, produce good quality content around those topics (blog posts, landing pages, online marketing and social media collateral content, etc.). It stands to reason that if it is working for them to drive traffic, it will work for you.
www.Alexa.com offers a free 7 day trial; once your appetite is whetted with the trial, you have three options for subscriptions, each with tiered offerings. Basic (least amount of competitive intelligence) is available at $9.99/month; Insight (middle level of competitive intelligence) at $49/month or the big daddy, most robust Advanced at $149/month
It may be worth a gander to see where you may be able to improve traffic to your site.
