Without the proper guidance and tools, you could find yourself throwing money out the window in a futile effort to attract more traffic.
Hence the importance of understanding the broad picture of how search engine optimization (SEO) works and how low-cost Internet tools could enhance your efforts.
Why competitive intelligence is important
To effectively use SEO techniques and online advertising, you need to know your competitors. This will give you a better idea of how much money and effort it will take to compete with them or find markets where they don't have a presence.
Free or inexpensive tools like OpenSiteExplorer.org, SpyFu.com, SEMRush.com, and the Google AdWords Keyword Planner can help you with this.
Evaluating the success of your SEO
You may have heard the term organic traffic before . It refers to visits to your site that don’t come from paid online advertising.
The more organic traffic your site attracts, the better, because you don’t pay per click or view. Some tools—including SEMRush.com and Spyfu.com—provide a dollar estimate of the value of that organic traffic and the keywords that generated it.
At the same time, you can see which keywords are driving free traffic to your competitors' websites and start using them yourself or identify other, highly effective ones that your competition has not exploited.
The example below shows the performance of linkedIn database Company XYZ’s website as measured with SEMRush.com. The tool identified 1,176 organic keywords that contributed to the monthly traffic volume on Company XYZ’s website. It also shows their site’s position (Pos) relative to a given keyword, the number of expected visits per month (Volume), and the cost per click (CPC) in dollars if we want to pay Google to appear in search results for that keyword.
The tool also identifies competing businesses that are using the same keywords as XYZ Company to rank in organic searches. This feature can help you identify competing businesses you may not have known existed.
We then took our top three competing websites and used another tool, called OpenSiteExplorer.org, to see each one's domain name authority, a predictive measure (expressed as a score out of 100) of how well a website will rank in search engine results.
Using this tool, you can determine which sites contain links pointing to your competitors' websites (inbound links). This allows you to contact these referring sites to ask them to link to yours as well.
Inbound links and keywords are the foundation of a strong search engine presence for any website. The stronger and more relevant the inbound links, the higher your Domain Authority will be.
Use tools to improve your online advertising campaigns
By combining tools like SEMRush and Google AdWords (Keyword Planner), you can determine who is competing with your paid search and what keywords your competing businesses are using in their campaigns.
You can then take their keyword choices and draw inspiration from their approach to advertising messages to create compelling marketing communications and advertisements that are tailored to your business.
By using various web tools, you can learn more about your competitors and their online activities. You will save time and money by avoiding keywords that are ineffective for your business and instead focusing on those that have already been proven by other businesses. This is especially true for keywords that are used to structure paid searches.
Tools like SEMRush.com, OpenSiteExplorer.org, SpyFu.com, and Google AdWords (keyword planner) can help you focus on profitable opportunities while exploring new avenues in your digital marketing efforts.
If you want to learn more about the importance of analyzing your website and the steps you can take to do one yourself, read How to Analyze Your Website . And to learn more about how to improve your online marketing, download our free guide, Attracting Customers and Selling Online: A Marketing Guide for Business Owners .
