Spy on your competition in five minutes! Using three free tools available on the web, it is possible to quickly do competitive research and discover insightful information. Find your competitor’s monthly visits, average page views, organic rankings, pay per click budgets, and pay per click search terms, and more, simply by knowing your competitor’s URL and entering it into these tools!

Tool #1 – Quantcast

Quantcast, while originally designed for advertisers and publishers, is a great tool to find out information regarding the visitors to your competitor’s website. Enter the competitor’s domain and press “Go.” Quantcast visitor information includes number of monthly visitors and demographic information such as gender, age, presence of children in the household, income, ethnicity, and education. For more information on how to interpret the Quantcast data, read here.

Tool #2 – Compete

When you first visit Compete, enter your competitor’s URL and hit the button “Get Site SnapShot.” The Compete SnapShot returns several metrics related to your competitor’s site. Similar to Quantcast, Compete also offers an estimate of the monthly visitors to the website. Compete data also includes statistics on pages per visit and average stay (or the number of minutes the average person spends on the site). For some websites, the “More Site Information” section may include data as to whether or not the site is “Trusted,” meaning it has been validated by GeoTrust and it has an “extensive site history” and may list current deals being offered by the website. For more information about the Compete SnapShot, click here.

Tool #3 – Spyfu

Spyfu is a fantastic tool, especially if your competition is engaged in Pay Per Click advertising. Enter your competitor’s domain and hit search. Spyfu returns data not only on organic search terms and rankings and that website’s organic competitors but also a wealth of PPC data as well. Spyfu can provide you with your competitor’s paid search terms and positions (as well as paid competitors) and other helpful estimates such as daily ad budget, clicks/day, average cost/click, average clicks/day, average ad position, average number of competitors for an ad, etc. Spyfu data can be very helpful in planning your own PPC campaign strategy.

The most important things about all of these tools – they are easy to use, accessible, and best of all, they’re FREE! So, what are you waiting for – get out there and find out what the competition is doing!

If you work in search engine optimization, I know you know this feeling. The keyword you have been tweaking on your client’s site and for which you have been working on obtaining links for weeks now finally breaks into the top ten on Google. You ran a report and found that the SEO work your company has been doing for the past few months actually produced increased leads and sales for a client. Stop for a moment and think about the last time your client’s most important keyword gets a number one ranking.

What a rush, right!?!

In our office, there are definite moments of elation/joy/“FINALLY!” Of course, on the flip side, when a client’s terms start to slide, it’s not what you want to see. Working on a three person team, you get to experience it all – and it is definitely an experience I would want everyone to have. There’s no better way to learn SEO than to dive right in – keyword research, content audits, analytics!

I think one of the job requirements for working in SEO is that you have to love to learn.

To be really good, I think deep inside you have to have a passion for learning. People who work in SEO belong to a community of learners. We learn from each other on blogs, newsletters, and message boards as well as at seminars. The world of SEO is constantly changing. As soon as you think you have something figured out, the algorithms change, but we can all work together improve results for our clients. I’ve only been in SEO for six months and I know there are plenty of things I don’t know about how it works, but to hear my boss who has been doing this for almost a decade admit to others there are things that he doesn’t know convinces me that search is an ever-changing space that you constantly need to educate yourself about. In our company, we take time as much as we can to read newsletters and blogs, and if we find something particularly outstanding, we built our own electronic Knowledge Base where we can essentially bookmark, summarize, and tag information that we think might be helpful for SEO or clients down the road.

I think my newfound passion for SEO stems from my love of playing games (and thereby, my competitive nature) and my love of trying to find an answer for everything (I’ve been known to spend hours trying to find answers to random questions on Google – like, why do football players wear those bands above their elbows or what might be causing my zone valve problem on my heater?). Winning a game and finding a long-sought after answer, to me, produce that same rush that you get when a keyword finally hits! And what’s more, when keywords start slipping too far, the game begins again – what can we tweak – title tags, descriptions, footers? Were we too aggressive somewhere?

SEO is one big puzzle with lots of different pieces – we just try to put them together in the right combination.

These are the moments I love. The high fives. The random cheers. But you know what? What I love even more about SEO is the thrill of the search. There’s always more work to be done. There’s always another spot to move up, another term that could be tweaked, another client that can use our help. Sure, the money’s nice too. But life is short. You have to have fun, and SEO is definitely a fun job to have. And if I can help some people find what they’re searching for along the way, that’s not too shabby.

After posting a blog entry on our site titled, “How Big Brands Screw Up Search,” I got to thinking… let me pick out one such company and give a live example. Today, I am picking on Nike.

I did a search on Nike as a keyword, and just that word alone came back with over 2.5 million searches performed last month according to the SEObook.com tool, which uses Overture’s keyword suggestion tool. This does not include the long-tail terms like Nike football cleats, Nike air force one, Nike sports bra, Nike golf balls and the millions of other searches done with the word Nike in it somehow. I wouldn’t be surprised if the branded Nike search volume were in the 15 million range.

Then think about all the unbranded search terms where Nike could get people to consider its brand — terms like golf shoes, golf gifts, golf clubs, footballs, football cleats, off-road running shoes, running shoes. You can just imagine that the number of searches done for these terms could dwarf the search volume for Nike’s branded terms. (Not to mention that an iProspect study found that roughly 36% of people associate ranking higher with being a better brand.)

OK, so now we know the potential. Let’s uncover how Nike is missing the boat and how it could right the ship with a slightly more focused effort on SEO and improving the customer experience of customers coming from search engines.

(more…)