Alexa.com Adds More Search Tools To Its Competitive Analysis
Amazon has two Alexas in its family: the intelligent voice agent that is popping up everywhere, and Alexa.com, a subsidiary which provides competitive analysis about any web site.
Today, the latter Alexa is announcing new features that pushes it deeper into world of the search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM).
New keyword and audience analysis
The new Alexa Site Overview service now provides keyword opportunities and audience analysis about any site or its competing sites.
A screenshot from Alexa.com, showing some of the new features.
The new keyword opportunities include words that competitors are using to drive traffic, but the site in question is not. Easy-to-rank keywords indicates popular keywords the given site could probably rank for, based on Alexa’s assessment of its Competitive Power.
Buyer keywords are those used for search by the site’s targeted audience, and which indicate a high intent to purchase by the searcher. And optimization finds popular keywords that currently drive only a small amount of traffic to the site, but could drive more traffic if they were better utilized.
Competitive analysis now shows a percentage of overall traffic from search engines to a given site compared with competing sites, the number of referral sites driving traffic compared to competitors, and top search terms for a site and competitors.
Audience Insights
In the new Audience Insights, a marketer can now see the categories of interest for a site’s audience, plus a listing of other sites in those categories that the audience visits. An audience overlap shows sites competing for that audience.
Previously, Alexa.com President Andrew Ramm told SEW via email, his site’s free Site Overview tool provided only traffic stats on an input site URL. In March of last year, the site added Competitor Keyword Matrix, to understand the keywords used by competitors.
Now, he pointed out, the free tool “automatically generates top competing sites that it uses as the basis for a more in-depth competitive analysis report.”
A comparison of search traffic, referral sources and top site keywords between a site and its competitors are free, while other features are included in the site’s subscription plan.
Griffith said that other free tools “don’t aggregate this information in a way that makes it easy to extract customized and actionable insights for a site,” based on competitors. Other tools, he added, “often focus on simply providing data about a site’s current performance [for such factors as keywords or traffic], but fall short of presenting untapped opportunities for the site.”
It’s always best to have tools and processes in place. Obviously, you don’t need anything fancy. You could start by setting up Google Alerts.
