[Video] How to Spy on Your Competitors Keywords, Traffic & Visitor Demographics

Published on April 18th, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

About the Author

Mitch (@mitchellharper) is the co-founder and CEO of BigCommerce. Way back in 2007 he built what eventually became BigCommerce as you know it. Today he runs the company alongside Eddie and along with our 100+ team members, is passionate about helping businesses succeed with e-commerce. Mitch spends time between our Sydney and Austin offices and is giving the keynote at TechConnect 2012 in Sydney on April 19th.

In this video I’ll show you how you can use two free tools to see how much traffic your competitors get, which keywords they rank for on Google and also the age, income, location, etc of their visitors. You can then use this information in your SEO, SEM and marketing campaigns.

Competitive intelligence is such a huge part of growing your business, and there are some people who will tell you to ignore what your competitors are doing, but I disagree with that. Looking at your competitors, particularly the well established ones, will show you areas in which you can have quick wins, but more importantly it will also show you where your competitors mis-stepped in the past so you can avoid those mistakes and also where they had big wins so you can replicate them.

For example, if you use Compete.com to track a competitor’s website traffic and you notice a massive spike in visits in September 2009 for example, then you can jump on Google News and do some detective work to try and figure out what they did to get that increase in traffic. Was it a press release? A partnership? A new marketing campaign?

You’ll be AMAZED at what you can learn with a bit of digging around…

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