If you ever get curious about your competitors’ websites eg. how well they are doing in search, what tools are they are using or what changes have they recently made – here are 4 tools that are free and easy to use.
- How good is their website in terms of SEO?
You could go to ubersuggest.com and enter a web address. This will then give you lots of information such as how well that site is setup for SEO, an estimate of how much traffic they get each month, what their domain authority is (Trust score), How many sites are linking back to them and which sites. (This could give you ideas for getting backlinks) You could then use the same tool to analyse your site and see how you compare.
- What technology are they using?
When you are using Google chrome do a Google search for “wappalyzer chrome extension” and install it on your browser. When you go a website click on the extension icon and it will give you an overview of the technology being used on the website eg. Is it a WordPress website or a Joomla or Shopify site? What type of ecommerce system is being used? What plugins are being used? What payment processing options are offered and lots more.
This tool is very handy if you are wondering how to tell whether a site is a wordpress, Joomla, Wix or Shopify site – a question I get asked a lot in courses.
- What changes did they make recently?
If a website has been updated recently you might want to compare it to the old version to see what has changed. Simply go to archive.org and enter a web address. You can then select a date in the past where a version of the site was “archived” and you can browse the pages to see what it looked like on that date.
Top tip! – This tool is also very handy if your site gets hacked and you didn’t have a backup copy – you can then copy all the text and images in order to rebuild it
- How well are they doing in search results compared to you?
If you would like to check where your site or a competitors’ site appears in Google search results for 10 search terms at a time, serprobot.com is a really useful tool. Simply enter a web address, the search terms and the country eg Google.ie and then it will tell you what position the site appears in search results. Then repeat this for your website and you can compare results.
Hope these tools are useful for your digital marketing