Manizesto

Understanding your competition is one of the most important things you can do to develop your marketing program, and there’s nothing wrong with conducting some covert operations to gain some perspective. That’s why I compared three of the top used car websites, Auto Trader, Cars.com and Automotive.com using three tools and learned quite a bit about each site. Here they are.

Tool #1-Alexa. Alexa.com is a tool to look at relative traffic between different sites. Though most people use Alexa to learn about general online consumer trends, you can also see how much traffic one site generates versus those of your competition.

There were some interesting findings when I looked at these three used car sites on Alexa (click image to enlarge):

Aside from the typical trends, such as the drop in traffic during the holidays and the jump in traffic in January, there were also some unexpected results. Like the sharp drop the last week of August with a distinct pattern that appears in all three sites. Perhaps this is due to school starting? Also interesting was the sharp peaks found in mid March. Are people searching for used cars right after getting their income tax returns?

Tool #2- Google Trends. Another tool you can use to spy on your competitors is Google Trends, which shows the relative number of searches by keyword on Google. I did some quick research on what I thought would be the top search terms for these three used car sites and what I found is that there are currently more far more searches for “autotrader” than there are for “used cars”, which seems to indicate Auto Trader has a much stronger brand than the other two sites; and the searches for “used cars” is almost identical to “auto trader” (with a space between words). See my search results here. 

Google Trends will give you a great idea what keywords people in your industry are using to find different websites. 

Tool #3- Whois.net. If you’ve ever wondered the name of the person or parent company that registered the domain of your competition, this is the spy tool you’re looking for. The Whois will also sometimes give you a mailing address, phone number and email of the person who registered the domain, as well as the domain expiration and IP address. Network Solutions has a similar tool. 

Using these tools, you can learn a great deal about your competitors. And if you are about to launch a website for your small business, you should look up all your competitors so you can get an idea of what to expect and avoid being surprised when your traffic seems to plummet for some inexplicable reason or you find out later that people are searching for your company name more than competitors. 

Get more spy tools by subscribing to Manizesto. 

Photo courtesty of naladahc. 

A website design program can be enhanced by seo tools, apart from having dedicated servers. This does not depend on the webmaster. However it is ideal to create a backup before starting work on search engine optimization.