Research Tools for Competitor Analysis

We need some research tools for doing competitor analysis for many reasons. It could be to find out the competitor in the Industry or even to know where are you standing in the bunch. Their are many competitor analysis tools, some free tools to help you look at what you are looking for. Lets look at some of the best competitor tools on web:

1. Alexa : is a free tool and gives you a brief analysis of your competitor traffic. You can check your website traffic and compare with that of your competitors.

2. Seobook Firefox Plugin : One of the best tool I would say for doing Competitor Analysis. Its free and you can use it as a firefox plugin. This tool check various factors of a webpage like site back links, .edu links, .gov links, age of the site, number of links from blog through Technorati and etc.

3. Compete : Compete has both free for basic and paid for advance. This is a great tool that can provide a statistical comparison of up to 5 different websites. Excellent for competitor analysis but the final data should be taken with a grain of salt because Compete can only produce stats on the limited data available.

4. Check Server Headers Tool : This is a free tool of Stepforth.com. A slightly technical this tool valuable insight into the setup of yours or your competitor’s servers. For example, StepForth uses this tool to verify that our clients have properly set up their server redirects (301’s) so that duplicate content issues are avoided. It is also used extensively within our competitor analysis reports; it is useful to see how your competitors might have an edge over you.

5. Xenu Link : This is a free tool. Please see the video below which explains about how effectively this tool can be used for SEO.


6. Domain Tools : Domain Tools is one of my favorite sites for competitor analysis. Its a free too. The most useful component, the Reverse IP Tool, allows me to plunk in a single competitor’s domain and then see every other website that is hosted on its server. In rare instances where the co-hosted domains are owned by the competitor I can get a hint at any future marketing plans my clients should be made aware of.

7. Robots.txt Syntax Checker : There is nothing worse than making an error in a Robots.txt file and accidentally dropping a site out of the search engines. The free Robots.txt checker will review your Robots.txt file; ensuring it is properly created and it will provide you with the rules within the file in plain language to ensure everything meets your approval. This is a valuable tool for avoiding serious indexing issues.