• Search Engine Land , Tuesday, January 29, 2008 12:30 PM

Staying on top of everything from the paid and organic keywords your competitors are vying for, to their strategies for using social media, can be vital to understanding your own unique value proposition. Mona Elesseily also says that competitive insights can help you vault to the top of the pile, as well as retain your top spot in the face of a competitor's new marketing campaign--and she offers a review of some tools you can use to gain the advantage.

Compete and Alexa both offer reach, rank and page view information for up to five sites, a must for gauging your competitors' market share in contrast with your own. Alexa provides more trend analysis, as the tool allows you to pull info from up to six years prior, in contrast to Compete's 12 months.

With SpyFu, you can enter a keyword, company name, URL, category or industry and get competitive analysis--including which specific terms competitors are bidding on. At the domain level, you can get info like average CPC, ad position and total clicks per day. Meanwhile, at the keyword level, SpyFu serves up info on things like the top 5 AdWords results (with a glimpse of each ad itself), number of advertisers and, of course, CPC.

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