competitor site statistics?

Ever wondered what kind of website traffic your competitors are getting?  Wonder what good benchmarks are?  Want to amp up your online marketing / SEO efforts by not only analyzing your own stats but those of comparable companies? Well, recently I stumbled upon Compete.com.

Compete.com is a web analytics company with both free and paid service offerings.  However, for us little guys, I use the free site analytics just to get a feel for what’s going on out there.  Simply go to the Site Profiles section and type in the URL.  For kicks I put in TechCrunch to see what would happen and you can review the results.  However, I was a bit disappointed that it wouldn’t handle domains with multiple words.  For instance, I put in blog.businessready.ca and it came up with no stats but when I put in businessready.ca it did.  This is odd because the blog gets way more traffic then the main site.

For the record, we rank #511,413 vs. facebook ranked at #3 or google which, of course, ranked #1 - my mother would be so proud.

Anyhow, if you are considering the paid services you can check the options out here and it is possible to just pay month to month (as defined in the terms of use).  I think it’s a bit steep so I didn’t shell out the US$200/month to test it fully but perhaps you have deep pockets and can do some targeted analysis in just a month.

I have to admit I wondered (a) how or where do they get all the information and (b) how did I feel about them having info on my site and sharing it with others (without asking me)?  Ah yes, the “public” domain.  Well, I guess it was just a matter of time before someone profited from my web stats (Hah!  I know no one would pay for that).