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In my last post I mentioned that the summer can be a good time to check out what your competitors are up to so that you can work out what you might need to do to improve your online marketing. There are a couple of tools I use to do this which gives me an idea of what competing sites are up to by reviewing where their back links are coming from.
The first tool is Yahoo Site Explorer: Just type the url of your website (including the http) into the search box at the top of the page and click on ‘Explore URL’. You’ll get two sets of results. Firstly, the number of web pages of your site that are in Yahoo’s index (under ‘Pages’). Next, if you click on ‘inlinks’, you’ll get a list of sites linking to your website that Yahoo has indexed. You can download the list of links by clicking on ‘Export first 1000 results to TSV’ and then save as an excel spreadsheet.
The next step is to put your competing sites’ urls into the search box and check out their back links.
By reviewing which sites are linking to your competitors, you can find out what marketing they’re doing e.g social media – are there links from Twitter? Do they participate on blogs and forums?
If they regularly appear in industry journals they may have a PR agency working for them. They may have random links, which show that they may have submitted to various directories in the past. However, you may find that there are sites in the list that you could also obtain a link from. Use the link list to get ideas and see where you could improve your online marketing or perform better than them.
A word of warning – the Yahoo Site Explorer tool may not be around for much longer as Bing is due to take over Yahoo’s search results quite soon. You can query back links on Bing by using the following:
“yourwebsite.co.uk” -site:yourwebsite.co.uk
(Type your query in exactly as it is in italics)
You should then get a list of sites linking back to yours or your competitors that Bing has indexed.
Don’t bother querying Google with the same query as Bing as Google doesn’t publicly show all links anyway.
A newer tool available is SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer. The guest version only gives you the first 200 back links, but if you register on the site, you can review up to 1000 back links, which is the same number as Yahoo.
It’s well worth carrying out this exercise every few months just to make sure your on top of your online marketing and keeping up with your competitors! What do you do to keep tabs on your competitors? Please share any tips you have!
