An important part of Internet marketing or business on the web is knowing what your competition is up to. Visiting your competitors’ web sites, reading their marketing copy, etc., is a great start when it comes to getting to know them.

What do you do, however, when you need hard numbers?

Where Can You Get Web Site Traffic Stats?

I spent my entire last post skewering Alexa for its inconsistencies and problems. Where can you get web site traffic rankings and information?

Fortunately, if you have data on your own web site, you aren’t completely out of luck. You can compare data from your site against other sites using Alexa, as long as you are in the same market—if site visitors to your site and to your competitors’ sites are similar kinds of people, then relative rankings, page views, reach, etc., in Alexa won’t be skewed so badly.

For example, if you compare two sites’ page views, you can get an idea of their daily traffic. If your site has 2 pages views per million on Alexa, and your competitor has 4, then your competitor is getting approximately double the page views you do. If your daily traffic is 150 unique visitors, then they are getting about 300.

My favorite new tool for using Alexa is Alexaholic. It allows you to compare up to 5 sites, over many different time periods, on much larger graphs. Check it out.

Page Rank, Inbound Links, and Rankings Oh My!

Another neat tool that aggregates information about your competitors is URL Trends site tracker. The free version tracks sites you want to follow on a monthly basis, giving you information about how a site stacks up in Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alexa, Del.icio.us, and a few others. You usually don’t need information on your competitors more than monthly, so this tool works well for most purposes.

If You’re Obsessed…

If you are really, really curious, you could research a site keyword by keyword. Use inventory.overture.com to estimate how many times a particular keyword is searched (multiply by about 3 to account for Google and MSN traffic, too), then search using those keywords. If your competitor is found on the first page of results, give it about 10% of the overall searches. If your competitor is 1st, 2nd, or 3rd, give it about 30%, 20%, and 15%. No, I don’t remember where I heard those percentages or if they are accurate. Let me know if you have heard of a better way to estimate traffic from search engines using this or a similar method.

Conclusion

Competitive intelligence is important, and as SEO gets more competitive, competitive intelligence will become more important to your success.

Are there any other reliable methods for researching competitors that you know of?