How to Analyze Your Blog Neighbors
Posted on 23. Jun, 2010 by Julius.
I just recently realized one of the best ways to analyze other blogs. Usually and even with smaller blogs you are interested in what kind of traffic they are getting and the amount of traffic they get.
Well I have to say that I have found the perfect tool.
Alexa
If a website is within the top 100k in Alexa you can get all sorts of information on the actual website which is great if you are trying to analyze it. Even if the website isn’t within the top 100k you can still gather useful information about it, even though it will not be as accurate.
The greatest insight I believe you can great through Alexa are the keywords through which the website gains most of its traffic. There is nothing that is more helpful in my opinion. And that’s exactly what Alexa gives us.
If, for example, we take a look at Copyblogger which is a great and unique blog. You can easily see what kind of traffic it is getting through keywords and which keywords are the most relevant to the site.
Copyblogger's most important keywords through which it gets search engine traffic
As you can see from the picture above the main sources of traffic for Copyblogger is from the keyword increase web traffic. The second highest being increase traffic and so forth. This will easily give you an idea of what kind of search queries are relevant to the site.
If you click on one of the keywords it will give you an indicator as to what site is getting traffic through these keywords and how much percent they get of the overall traffic. If you combine this insight with the Google External Keyword tool information you get for the chosen keyword, you get a pretty clear view of how much traffic the site receives from this keyword alone.
In the above example, the Query Popularity will give you an indication of how often people are searching for these particular keywords. The QCI is an indicator of the advertising competition for that keyword. The higher the number (of Query Popularity or QCI) the more traffic or the more competition.
The much more interesting aspect about Alexa is that it offers SEM tools at the bottom of each of these pages. If you install the Alexa toolbar you will instantly get access to the information for SEM strategies. Especially if you are relying on PPC campaigns then it might be well worth the effort to install the Alexa toolbar to get some details on the kind of competition you face when placing advertisement.
DoubleClick Ad Planner
If you combine this kind of information with the sort of information you get from the DoubleClick Ad Planner from Google you will then get a clear result of the kind of audience that the blog is attracting. But not only of the audience but also of the keywords that are popular. Keep in mind that the keywords that the ad planner displays are those based on the highest affinity, meaning those where Copyblogger is ranking extremely well, i.e. for the term copyblogger, copywriting etc.
The most important search engine keywords and also similar websites that were also visited
The only problem with DoubleClick Ad Planner is that it only offers information for big websites, you won’t even be able to find most blogs, Copyblogger seems to be an exception here.
So what could you do with this kind of information? Well you could use it to try to rank for some of these keywords or even better it will give you a way of understanding what kind of keywords you shouldn’t try to rank for at all.
Keep in mind that this kind of information might be also very useful for doing product or niche research such as when building mini sites.
What do you think? Was this helpful at all?
Seth Demsey
23. Jun, 2010
Hey Julius – nice post. I’m the product manager for Ad Planner at Google. I wanted to give you and your readers a few more details on DoubleClick Ad Planner that may be useful. First off, as a blog (or site) owner you can claim your site in Ad Planner’s publisher center (http://www.google.com/adplanner/publisher). You can also choose to opt in your directly measured traffic (via Google Analytics) and show that number instead Ad Planner’s estimate. Also, we’ve got new data in a section called Audience Interests that gives you a higher level view of the interests of your site’s viewers. Hope this is helpful!
Julius
27. Jun, 2010
Thank you for the information, Seth. I am sure it is very useful to my readers. I will definitely take a look at it.
Eric
26. Jun, 2010
Personally I need to use Alexa more myself. I hardly ever check out my site on it and I know it’s not actually even recognised by it. I do find this helpful when searching for blogs though.
I guess I have more work to do if I want to end up showing up on Alexa eh?
Julius
27. Jun, 2010
Alexa is an important tool and can be extremely useful. Especially for what I have talked about here, i.e. analyzing websites or particularly keywords.
If you want to have a higher Alexa rank then simply install the Alexa toolbar
The Bad Blogger
28. Jun, 2010
Seriously to get into Alexa 100k is quite simple, although I haven got into the first 100k but I’m nearly there since I do not post often.
Of course I’m not saying I’m good but there is always a way or two to get to where you want, I’m not sure much about SEO or keywords stuff, to me if your content is good and unique and placing on article directories seems to push Alexa ranking faster then normal.
Rhys
09. Jul, 2010
I don’t really like Alexa. It’s too easily to manipulate.
Julius
10. Jul, 2010
I agree. Alexa is extremely easy to manipulate yet its the only tool available to measure such things as the traffic a website gets. Thanks for the comment man.