Finding Your Competitors Traffic Sources

One of the easiest ways to build traffic to a new site, is to steal your competitors. Maybe stealing isn’t the best word for it, because we aren’t physically stealing anything. But checking up where your competitors get their traffic from, then getting a piece of that cake is definitely one of the first things i do when i build a new site. Especially if its a new service or product. Really this allows me to see what avenues they are using to advertise their product, and then i go on the same forum/website and get a slice of that pie.

Logically, we should start with a simple backlink check. We can try both in Google and Yahoo , although Yahoo will usually bring us the best results (Google doesn’t like making backlinks public).

For Google we type in : link:mysite.com
For Yahoo we type in : linkdomain:mysite.com

Although Yahoo shows most of our backlinks, sometimes they show them in such a way that shows off alot of the garbage links that we dont really need. For a better analysis i would advise you to use BacklinkWatch.com or WhoLinksToMe.com. The latter makes it far easier to sift through duplicate links which is always a bonus.

A good trick to use is “footprints” to find specific type of links. So if you want to see which forums your competitors are advertising on (Usually a good place to start if your competitor is offering a service or product), Then you can use extra footprints in Yahoo to find what we are looking for. For example :

So as you can see. We are using the normal backlink check. But with a “powered by vbulletin” addon. This means that all backlinks it returns will have the text “powered by vbulletin” on the page. Obviously these are all VBulletin forums as every Vbulletin forum has that text in the footer.

There is literally no end to the amount of footprints you can use in conjunction with Yahoo to find different sorts of backlinks. You can use “powered by smf” to find Small Machines Forums or “powered by wordpress” to find all wordpress blogs linking to that site (Useful to find where the best places to leave blog comments are . Even things like site:.edu will find all .edu backlinks for that website.

To be honest, usually Yahoo is enough to find almost everything i need. Most often i am interested in forum posts more then anything. But every now and again i want to get a bit more of a further insight into what’s driving the traffic. So we have two options :

Alexa
You can use Alexa’s “clickstream” on any site to find upstream sites for that page. Kinda confusing to explain. But basically its showing referrers for any given website.

The above is a picture of what this sites clickstream looks like in Alexa. It is careful to note, that maybe i shouldn’t have used the word “referrer” in my above paragraph. As alexa shows what site people were on before they came to yours. So it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have a link from that site, just that people were there before they came to yours. Otherwise hell, i have a link from Microsoft! When in actual fact its people downloading the latest .net framework to run my applications.

So just be careful about reading into these values as often these arent driving any traffic at all. But invesitgating these sources may bring up some goldmines, so just check it out anyway.

Compete.com
Compete is like Alexa but with a pricetag. I dont know anyone who has ever paid for Compete.com’s complete analytics. And in a minute ill show you why. But at this point in time, just keep everything free with Compete. You dont need to pay squat to get the basic information.

So as per usual, i ran this site through Compete.com :

Unfortunately none of these referrers are even close. With the exception of Google.com, i get zero traffic from all of these. Not hard to see why people dont pay for Competes full analytics when they cant even get the basic right.

Im probably being a bit unfair. Because sometimes compete has been right on the button with referrers of other sites i own. But once again. A grain of salt.

Conclusion
With all of these methods, including using Yahoo and Google to find backlinks. Its best to take these things with a grain of salt. All of these can be easily manipulated, especially on smaller sites. Both the Compete and Alexa statistics are reliant on people with their respective toolbars installed. Meaning that if you are in a demographic that likes installing toolbars (Teenagers i guess), then your stats will be much more reliable then people in say a tech savy niche.