Alexa.com, an Amazon-owned competitive analysis company, on Thursday released several new tools that give small and midsize businesses with 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, 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.
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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 not 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 It was years old and outdated.”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, 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 didn’t 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 contributors to the panel.