• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 27, 2019

Alexa.com, an Amazon-owned competitive analysis company, on Thursday released several new tools that give small and midsize businesses free competitive tools typically available only to large companies with dedicated analytics teams. This supports search data gathered from Google and Bing.

The Alexa Site Overview service, which serves more than 3 million unique users monthly, now reveals a brand’s strengths, weaknesses, the opportunities to reach its audience, and more.

Relevant data about the site, its audience and keyword gaps, as well as the same data about competing sites, are part of the package. These services were not previously available through the 20-year-old platform.

Previously, the data provided a breakdown of traffic analysis, but the company has completely redesigned it, explains Andrew Ramm, president of Alexa.com. He estimates marketers will spend about $5 billion annually producing content, but the majority fails to perform.

Now brands are getting all this keyword and search engine optimization data for free. The company also offers a paid service for SEO and paid search.

Andy Crestodina, co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media, use the data to see what's working for competitors and what is not working for the brands the Chicago web development agency serves. Through the data he often finds several actions to take to get better results.

“While we still has many people doing basic traffic analysis, all of our growth is being fueled by search engine content marketing,” Ramm said. “None of that was reflected in our freemium model. It was years old and outdated.”

Input a website and Site Overview surfaces a custom list of keywords for the site, the top websites competing for the attention of that site’s audience, and that site’s traffic metrics compared to the average of those top competing sites, and other competitive intelligence.

For example, Nike.com lists the keyword opportunities breakdown as 59,400 keyword gaps, with 34,100 optimization opportunities. The site gets 8.85% of its organic search traffic referrals from the keyword “Nike,” and 45.96% share of voice, percentage of all searches for that keyword that sent traffic to that website.

It took developers at Alexa.com about four months to redesign the site and create new services. Ramm did not note any challenges. “All the data already exists inside the service through an internal API feed,” he said. “It was really about designing the page and getting customer feedback on what they wanted to see.”

The insights are collected through a panel of millions of internet users who contribute browsing and clickstream data anonymously, so no one can use the data to determine the contributors to the panel.