Knowledge is power, but it’s hard when you don’t know what you don’t know! Fortunately, today’s blog topic is about 6 great free tools to help evaluate yourself website and the competition.

Evaluating Competition

1. Google Alerts – you simply sign up with your email and specify what keywords or topics you want to receive updates on. For example, real estate professionals may want to keep track of "foreclosures in ABC Town" to see if anything comes up or changes from week to week. You can also enter the name of your competitor to see when and where they make news, updates to their website, etc.

2. Open Site Explorer – this allows you to enter the address of any website to see how many backlinks it has and where each of those backlinks leads. You can enter a competitor’s site and see who’s linking to them, and you can enter your own site to see who’s linking to you.

3. SpyFu – like Open Site Explorer, this allows you to enter the address of any website. However, rather than showing you backlinks, SpyFu provides info on the website’s PPC activities and rankings. You can quickly examine what keywords they are using and the results without having to go through the process yourself.

Evaluating Yourself

1. Website Grader – a free tool from HubSpot that generates a fairly large report (approximately 10 pages) about the SEO, content, and meta-tag quality of your website with specific suggestions on how to improve. The free report is well-worth sifting through.

2. WooRank – similar to Website Grader, a report about the SEO, content, and meta-tag quality of your website. Sometimes it’s good to get a second opinion and then compare the two. You’d be surprised at how much room for improvement there is for any given website!

3. 123Worth – after you enter the address of your website, the tool calculates how many visitors your website gets daily and monthly, as well as the estimated daily ad earnings. You also get the estimated price/worth of your website, and its Alexa rating (a site rating software owned by Amazon).

Armed with the knowledge available from these tools, you can find out what’s working/not working for you and get insight into what the competition is doing.