Here's 5 free analytical tools to get insights on your opposition
Chris Baker
Dynamic Sales Specialist | Trusted Partner to Elite Real Estate Teams | Expert in Luxury Property Marketing | Entrepreneur
It's one thing to be on top of how your own marketing campaigns are performing in real estate, but another entirely to know what your competitors are doing.
These five tools will help you monitor the competition, decipher the secrets behind market trends and provide insights that will help you develop future marketing strategies – all without spending a cent.
1. Google Alerts
Google Alerts are simple to set up. Simply choose a word, phrase or company name you’re interested in and you’ll be emailed every time that term is picked up by Google. You can use this to see what people are saying about your company, detect where your competitors are getting backlinks and determine what’s trending in the media about your industry.
2. Marketing Grader
Marketing Grader helps to monitor the competition by giving a good overview of how well a site – yours or someone else’s – is doing online. The URL you enter is rated across five categories, each with tips on how to improve. One of its best features is showing how often blog posts get shared on social media, so you can quickly see which types of articles perform best for you and your rivals.
3. SimilarWeb
Ever wondered what the analytics of another website look like? SimilarWeb will give you a pretty good breakdown. Just submit the URL for one of your competitors and you’ll be shown estimates for traffic numbers, sources and major keywords. This will provide you with some good data that you can benchmark your own results against. And if you ever wanted to muscle in on someone else’s territory, this sort of information could be very beneficial.
4. Majestic
There are many tools available that measure a site’s backlinks, but the most popular and accurate free tool is Majestic. Here you’ll be able to learn where sites are getting backlinks, the anchor text they most commonly use and how you can try to compete in certain areas. Paid subscriptions are available for additional data and information.
5. Topsy
Topsy started off as a social media monitoring tool – letting you see years’ worth of tweets and information from the most influential Twitter accounts – but now it also provides information on links, photos and videos. This shows the best of a competitor on Twitter and also displays who else mentions them, which might give you an idea or two about who to network and connect with.