WebComp Analyst Review
As the first product review on this blog, I’ll have a look at a new keyword tool called WebComp Analyst. But before the actual review, let’s begin with a quick look back on some Internet marketing history.
I remember a few years back, when the “Bum Marketing method” was being taught. If you’ve never heard of the term for some strange reason, the strategy basically involve (mostly) affiliate marketing with various forms of article submission as the main source of traffic.
In order to maximize the strategy the early bum marketers advocated you to go to Google and lookup your potential key phrases in quotes – the theory being that it would be easier to rank well with a piece on Ezine Articles for a keyword where there weren’t too many competing sites.
Today of course, we all know that this was a gross oversimplification of estimating what it takes to rank for certain keyword phrases. But if you are building niche sites and submitting articles it is still a good idea too try and estimate what phrases you actually have a chance to rank for.
And that is where the software application – WebComp Analyst by Jonathan Leger – I’ll be reviewing in this post comes into the picture. It is designed to give just the quick overview you need in order to target the appropriate keywords.
Not The Whole Truth, But Valuable Nonetheless
Google uses hundreds of various criteria for ranking sites in their search results, and with many of them we really have no idea how they work or how much they actually influence the search results. However, among the things we CAN measure with some accuracy, it is a well established theory that backlinks with the appropriate anchor text can help boost rankings a great deal. And for this reason analyzing the backlinks of competing sites it is a great indicator of how difficult it will actually be to rank high for certain keywords.
As a smaller, niche site building player this is something you should pay attention to. Naturally you need to do all the right things with your on-page SEO as well, but for many phrases a few links with the appropriate anchor text really can do wonders. It is also one of the reasons you will never likely outrank about.com for the search term “about”.
When it comes to analyzing backlinks to other people’s sites, Yahoo Site Explorer is currently the search engine of choice. Google offers only a glimpse into their real database of recorded backlinks, so they aren’t currently a good alternative. But it seems the much more thorough numbers you get from Yahoo are highly relevant for how sites rank in the big G as well.
There are many ways of using Yahoo to check backlinks. In order to illustrate some of them I have made this short video, that compares WebComp analyst to some of the other alternatives out there.
It should be added that there really are lot’s of free backlink checking tools out there – just do a search in Google – but most have the same limitations as I mentioned in the video. Generally speaking you are analyzing one URL at a time, which is a more appropriate strategy for deeply analyzing a particular competing site. On the other hand, some of these free alternatives – SEO for Firefox for example, provide you with much more information.
There are also several services out there, Compete.com for instance, that gives you all the information you get in WebComp Analyst and then some. They really represent another level of link analysis altogether. But this is usually also clearly visible in the price tag, and such services do not tend to be a one-time purchase.
Personally I think that Jonathan Leger, found a gap among the current offerings of keyword analysis tools and filled it with a decent enough application. I would say that WebComp Analyst is a great little tool to have if you:
- Are on a relatively small budget
- Produce niche sites targeting mostly long tail keywords
- Submit articles to article directories
…or any other scenario where you frequently want to determine for what phrases the amount of link-juice you can create will be sufficient.
If you always need a lot of additional information, you can afford it and/or represent a bigger company you might probably want to go for some of the keyword analysis services that give you all the technically possible bells and whistles in one package. If your keyword research is primarily for Adwords and other PPC advertising WebComp Analyst probably isn’t for you either.
As you saw in my video, and can see even more of if you watch the demo video over at the main site for this software, WebComp analyst is a rather simple application that you run on your personal computer. This also means that it isn’t terribly fast. Don’t get me wrong – it still beats any of the free ways of doing the same thing by hand by several miles – but on my computer it seems to take about a minute per keyword you want to analyze, so analyzing hundreds of keywords at a time would take a considerable amount of time.
The ability to analyze backlinks in many various languages also make this an application that works well even if you produce your content in a language other than English.
The application also has functions for querying the free versions of Wordtracker and ask.com, but personally I usually prefer to use Google’s free keyword suggestion tool instead.
Conclusion
To sum it up; WebComp Analyst is somewhat of a one trick pony. But it does what it is intended for very well, and is a very affordable one time investment. If you are an online “infopreneur” it is certainly a tool worth a closer look. Like the other offerings from Jon Leger that I have used, the software runs well without any noticeable bugs or other problems and the user interface couldn’t be easier to understand.
If you want to purchase WebComp Analyst through my affiliate link, because you found this review helpful, I’d be much obliged.
If that is against your principles, here is a non-affiliated link to WebComp Analyst.
If you have any additional questions about this software, feel free to post them below and I’ll do my best to answer them.
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