Spy on your competitors in search engines

This article will help you to find answers to the following questions:

• How successful are my competitors in search engines?
• How well known is my brand?
• Which keywords are important for my competitors?
• How many backlinks do they have?

As an example let’s compare four online shoe stores: schuh.co.uk.

Brand awareness

The chart bellow was created using search. It shows popularity of the selected shoe stores in Google search during the last year.

Dsw.com leads the peloton followed closely by schuh.co.uk. The other two sites are far less popular.

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool gives us very similar results:

Search engine rankings – Collabim

Collabim offers many great SEO features which you can try out free. Let’s use the Site finder tool to find keywords for which our competitors ranks better than our site. The table shows ranking comparison of our own sample site MyShoeStore.com and Schuh.co.uk in Google.com.

Backlinks – MajesticSEO

Use the MajesticSEO Backlink History Tool to analyze backlink growth of your competitors. Don’t forget to create your own free account to be able to use all features of this great tool.

Enter your competitor sites and Set View mode to Cumulative. This allows you to see the total number of backlinks not monthly changes only.

All the sites except wittner.com.au have very similar backlink growth rate so wittner.com.au will probably have the worst positions in search engines like Google.

Conclusion

You should regularly watch your competitors but don’t get too obsessed with them. You’d better to spend your time improving and promoting your own products or services.

Are you planning on developing SEO on your website? Try the step-by-step guide.