The Competitive Research panel is moderated by Andrew Goodman, who immediately calls Andy Beal to the podium.

Andy walked through a list of tools for competitive research:

• Domaintools.com - whois lookup (uses subscription for more info)
• Ranks.nl/tools/spider.html - keyword density tool
• Use siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com for link checking - backlinks are ordered by importance
• seomoz.org/tools - particularly the page strength tool.
• soloseo.com/tools/indexrank.html - index rank tool
• copernic.com - tracks changes on pages
• Technorati.com - set up rss feeds and find out when a competitor is talked about
• Google alerts - the glue and baling wire approach
• searchanalytics.compete.com - shows referrals that a site is getting from the search engines
• Touchgraph.com - shows hubs
• google.com/patents - look for new products
• monster.co.uk - look for job listings (new services, replacements, etc)
• Read your competitor’s employee blogs
• Searchstatus for firefox

Next up Maxime Grandchamp.

Sources of information are not only online, think offline too - newspapers, financial information, etc.

You can know that a competitor makes a change, but you don’t know why. Don’t assume that it’s necessarily because they’re improving their site, it could be for any number of reasons.

Competitive Research companies typically collect their data from many sources

• ISP data
• User panels
• Website Search History

Make sure you know who your competitor is, they may not be the ones you’re thinking of, look at who is ranking / bidding for your audience to find out who your competition really is.

Info you want to get on your competitors

• Who is sending them traffic?
• How much traffic?
• What keywords are being clicked on to get them there?

Search engines are not the only source of traffic, and if search engines are your only source of traffic, start to panic now!

Learn from your competitors. Knowing performance will help you optimize your site around proven data, streamlining your spend and increase your ROI.

Don’t guess at keywords, do your research, and get above your competitors where it really counts. See what drives traffic to them, and steal that traffic.

Last up Robin Goad.

Search accounts for a third of all traffic sent to websites.

• Brand and navigational search is on the rise, but the long tail of smaller terms is also getting bigger.
• Analysis of search data provides insight into what people are thinking
• Hitwise tracks 10m search terms per month

Showed a comparable graph for Tesco and Asda, showing the same valleys and peaks (both internet traffic to their sites, and for their brand terms).

He then showed a search term suggestion tool that showed the different terms searched for - showing the products that people associate with them - i.e. insurance with Tesco, George for Asda. 3 x as many searches for Tesco as Asda

Next was looking at the actual destination of the traffic. Not all searches are equal. George is important for Asda, but ranks below other areas that seemed less important in search data - people don’t necessarily click through to the brand site.

Filed under: Education and Training on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine |
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