Using Compete.Com to Track Your Site and Spy on Your Competitors

I love compete.com as it gives you some good insite on your site and your competitors. Compete.com gets it’s data from users who have downloaded and installed their toolbar.  Now before you go off and start yelling about how this is another piece of spyware let me tell you NOTHING on the web is free.  Yes, you may have not paid for it but your behavior online is being recorded.  You think Google does not do this when you enable Page Rank to be displayed on your installed toolbar? Think again!

OK, back to compete.com. The free version of compete will give you really good incite on your competitors such as monthly visitors, average stay, page visits monthly, monthly rank, and other good stuff.   Here si a quick snapshot of my old sites newhomes.com and americanhomeguides.com:

compete.com snapshot of newhomes.com and americanhomeguides.com

I think the hidden jewel of this tool is to see what keywords drive traffic to a website.  To see this info just sign up for a free account and perform a site analytics search. You will see some teaser info on the lower right hand side of the report.  Now don’t be fooled, these keywords can come from both natural or paid referral traffic but still a great place to see what your competitors are getting their traffic from.

Now compete offers paid versions as well that give you access to more reports that really makes spying on your competitors more visible. The standard version is where you get to split  referring keywords by natural or paid.  At 299/month it can be a little pricey for the small SEO professional but it does offer more than the free version.

I like to use it for a benchmarking my sites to others in the industry and the keywords they receive traffic from.  The also offer a tool bar that is nice as it give you basic info on the site you are on without going to compete directly.

Give it a shot and see what you think.

As you can see from the above snapshot it is a nice tool