Wed Dec 26 07:03:15 PST 2018

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has, which means that my site will have a higher Alexa rating than it should. Many
days my site has ranked in the top 1,000 sites on Alexa, while other sites I own that
get more traffic are not in the top 10,000. Looking at my traffic stats I can tell you
those stats are bogus.
What is Alexa good for? Just like how Google shows historical data via Google
Trends, Alexa shows historical traffic trends for websites. That should help you
zero in on key marketing mechanisms they used and when they used them. Alexa
breaks down the visitor ratio between the root domain and subdomains so you can
see what parts of competing sites are heavily trafficked. Alexa also shows other
sites owned by a company. This can be useful data for niche discovery.

HitWise is another competitive analysis tool that has partnerships with many search
sites and Internet service providers to track user behavior. I believe Alexa is
installed on about a million computers and HitWise tracks about 25 million users.
The HitWise data is rather expensive to access for the small site webmaster, but has
great competitive analysis data showing historical figures, terms that drive the most
traffic to competing sites, and information regarding from which other sites
competitors? traffic has come.
As referenced above when mentioning their Keyword Intelligence tool, I think
some of the HitWise data is likely going to be a bit top-heavy.
Compete.com is similar to Alexa, but Better
Compete is a newer competitive analysis tool that shows site ranking, pageviews
per visitor, and time on site. Compete has less of a webmaster related bias than
Alexa does because Compete gets most of their data from Internet service
providers instead of toolbars.
Compete.com also sells a highly recommendable and affordable product called
Search Analytics, which shows you keywords sending traffic to a competing site.
Here is a snapshot of keywords sending traffic to SEO Book. Notice that for 5
credits (~ $20
you can download a couple thousand unique keywords that sent
traffic to my site. The site share stat shows what % of the site?s search traffic the
associated keyword represents.