Is Your Mortgage Competitor Receiving More Business Than You?

Is Your Mortgage Competitor Receiving More Business Than You?

Ever wonder how that mortgage competitor of yours is doing? Curious about how you can find out how much traffic or how many sales they receive? Wondering if you can somehow find the web sites that link to them and also get these sites to link to you?

You can use the Internet to perform competitive intelligence on your competitors, and then take that information and use it to improve your site. By using these existing online Internet tools and social engineering queries, you can find out how much business your competitors are earning. You can run these tests on your own site.

Or if you are thinking about starting a new mortgage web site, you can "Test" the business by estimating how well it might do.

As a side note, the best way to test this is to try these techniques on your web site; to see if your competitors can determine how much business you are doing.

Let's start with the easiest methods and work upwards:

1. VISIBLE COUNTER
See if they have a visible stat counter - visit every day for a week and see how the counter changes. Then visit it weekly to watch for changes such as spikes around mortgage rate reductions, or if there is a news story related to a specific type of loan, or if it is time for college and people are examining a refi for their home; if any of that results in more traffic. If you look at sites like http://www.mortgages4u.com/ and http://www.mortgage-ams.com/ you can see their traffic counters. Of course, many people start their counters at 10,000 instead of at 0.

2. DO AN INQUIRY
For most online retail stores, one way to perform competitive intelligence on a competitor is to order something small and see what the invoice number is, then go back and order a week later and see how that invoice number changed. Repeat as often as your curiosity and bank balance allows you to. In the mortgage business, it is hard to keep taking out loans, but sometimes companies have reference numbers if you submit an inquiry. You can watch how that reference number changes.

3. ALEXA.COM
Alexa is a service that estimates traffic based on visitors to various sites using the Alexa toolbar. From the Alexa site, it says;

"How are Alexa's traffic rankings determined? Alexa's traffic rankings are based on the usage patterns of Alexa Toolbar users over a rolling 3 month period. A site's ranking is based on a combined measure of reach and page views. Reach is determined by the number of unique Alexa users who visit a site on a given day. Page views are the total number of Alexa user URL requests for a site. However, multiple requests for the same URL on the same day by the same user are counted as a single page view. The site with the highest combination of users and page views is ranked #1.

Alexa's traffic rankings are for top level domains only (e.g. domain.com). We do not provide separate rankings for subpages within a domain (e.g. www.domain.com/subpage.html) or subdomains (e.g. subdomain.domain.com) unless we are able to automatically identify them as personal home pages or blogs, like those hosted on Geocities and Tripod. If a site is identified as a personal home page or blog, its traffic ranking will have an asterisk (*) next to it: Personal Page Avg. Traffic Rank: 3,456*. Personal pages are ranked on the same scale as a regular domain, so a personal page ranked 3,456* is the 3,456th most popular page among Alexa users.

4. STATBRAIN.COM
Statbrain is another service to estimate the amount of traffic to a site. They say,"How accurate is Statbrain? Statbrain estimates the number of visits that a website has based on offsite factors like backlinks, Alexa Rank etc. Statbrain does not have access to log files or any counter information. The number of visits that Statbrain estimates gives you an idea of the number of visits that a website has, but not the exact visitor number."

I have tested it against some of our sites and I would say it is in the ballpark.

5. URLTRENDS.COM
UrlTrends was developed to allow Webmasters, search engine optimizers, and domain buyers to determine a websites (or a specific pages) rankings in the various search engines and directories. Based on this information you can make competitive analysis of any website with another website -- and from this you could possibly determine their traffic by the number of links to them.

UrlTrends offers a report which allows webmasters to view their linking trends for eight different search engines (including Google, Alexa, Yahoo!, MSN), as well as the PageRank and Alexa Rank. A recent addition also allows our users to view the number of end-users of a website that bookmarked the website using Furl or Del.icio.us.

6. YAHOO.COM & GOOGLE.COM
Use Yahoo & Google Search to determine who links to a particular site.

In the search box enter EACH of the following permutations, as even though they appear the same, they may produce different results

http://www.DomainName.com
http://DomainName.com
DomainName.com
link:http://DomainName.com
link:http://www.DomainName.com
link:DomainName.com
"http://www.DomainName.com" with the quote marks
"www.DomainName.com" with the quote marks
"DomainName.com" with the quote marks

Please note, that some of the above searches will return zero results, while others may return thousands of results.

7. WHOLINKS2ME.com
Use online link analysis resources to analyze competitors links, such as WhoLinks2Me.com.

8. SOCIAL ENGINEERING LOOK-UPS
Try asking by using "social engineering look-ups" and try and guess the admin page for the competitors stat program.

domainname.com/logs.htm
domainname.com/logs.html
domainname.com/stats.html
domainname.com/stats/
domainname.com/admin/
domainname.com/logs/

... not all these work, but you get the idea.

9. SOCIAL ENGINEERING SEARCHES
Try "social engineering searches" ie

"domainname.com" +logs
"domainname.com" +stats
"domainname.com" +"number of visitors"
"domainname.com "+visitors
"domainname.com "+"mortgage leads"

... not all these work, but you get the idea.

10. Try peeking at the HTML

Do a right click on your mouse and "View Source" and see if you can see a reference to a stat counter. Usually you can find the code for a stat program right before the closing body HTML code, ie /body

Sometimes domains use free stats counters I just randomly searched and found http://extremetracking.com/open;unique?login=tgrmn you can see their stats - about four visitors a day.

Also, if you look at the referring sites, such as I did at
http://extremetracking.com/open;ref1?login=loan2b
you can see which sites are linking to them, then you can approach that site and ask for a link as well.

First try these techniques on your site, then compare the results to your competitors sites. From their results, you may be able to find more ways to drive traffic to your site. And more targeted traffic…means more closed sales.