Your Favorite Tools for Competitive Analysis?
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When you review your competitors online presence, what are some of your favorite tools?
I like Open Site Explorer's domain comparison tool. SEMRush is great too but the data is often inaccurate.
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Totally agree, EGOL.
If you can't beat the competitors content, you don't really deserve to beat them in the rankings. Although it certainly is possible to beat competitors with good links on the short term, it's really hard in the long term.
This being said, if I feel I have (or can create) the content to beat the competitors, I certainly do look at the competitors links to scout for opportunities.
I usually use OSE + the SERP analysis tool (http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty). That's enough to get a good overview of all the good links to the competitors. You can go to Majestic for a larger index, but that will probably only add the links that won't matter much to you anyway.
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This is for an information site....
I go to Google.com and search for the root keyword that I want to rank for. I look at the top ten sites and ask... "Can I defeat their content?". If "yes" then I attack trying to make content that will be far superior to the best that is out there. I don't look at their links or any other metric, if I can beat their content I jump into the fight.
For a retail site I do the same thing but place house ads on the content page that funnel visitors to pages where I can make money.
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