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It has never been easier to monitor your main competitors. The Internet, social media and
Web 2.0 programs gives you an incredible range of tools to watch what your competition is doing.
Why monitor the competition? Monitoring the competition keeps your sales and marketing
strategy current. Do not wait for your potential customers to tell you about the nifty new
service offered by your top competitor. If you know what your competitor is doing, you can
make any necessary changes to your service to be competitive. At the least, you are ready to
explain why your current service remains the prospect’s best choice.
We list below a few of easy ways to watch your competition. All techniques are free, but they do take time.
- Google alerts, which are among the best free tools available. For your top two or three
competitors set-up a Google Alert. Simply go to Google News, conduct a search on each
competitor’s name and select the “create an email alert” option after the search results.
Each time news about your competitors hit the Google news database, you will receive an alert.
You can also track changes to Web sites and blog postings, depending on how you configure the alert.
- Use RSS feeds to send Google Alerts and blog postings (for competitors) and for industry
blogs to a central dashboard.
- Monitor your competitors’ web traffic. You can use several free online tools to do this,
such as alexa or quantcast. While not exact, these tools will give you a good idea of the volume of
visitors coming to your competitors’ Web sites.
- Check the sites linking to your competitor’s Web site. A surprising majority of visitors
come to a Web site from clicking on a link listed on another site.
These are called backlinks. These incoming links are important for two reasons. First, Google
considers backlinks in determining the order in which to list Web sites on a search page.
Secondly, as mentioned, backlinks drive more traffic than search.
To check on a competitor’s backlinks, use the Yahoo backlinks tool. Google only reports
about 5% of the backlinks it knows about. Set-up a Yahoo account (it is free).
Go Yahoo's site explorer tool
Enter your competitor’s URL and make sure you exclude links from the competitor’s domain.
You can also use this tool to track changes.
- Review Your Competitors’ Keyword Focus and Ranking. You should have a keyword
strategy for your Web site, which includes the keywords on which you want your Web site to get a top
ranking. You can check your competitor’s strategy online by viewing their source code.
Simply go to your competitor’s Web site. At the top of your browser and click on "View",
then click on "Source" or "Page Source" depending on your browser.
You will see a page of html code pop up. At the top of the page look at their keyword and/or meta tags.
If your competitor has a keyword strategy, the words should appear in one of these tags.
You can also look at the keyword density of your competitor’s pages by using the free
keyword density tool
- Keep an eye on their executives. For the top members of your competitor’s exec team, you can set-up
Google alerts (see above). If they make a new hire, look at the new exec’s bio. Are they moving in a new
direction? A new hire’s job announcement might highlight that. If your competitor’s Web site has a career’s
page, monitor it for listings of job openings.
- Sign-up for their e-newsletter and/or RSS feeds. You can use your Google account if you do not
want the competitor to see your corporate email in their database. You can send RSS feeds to your igoogle portal.
If you do not have the time to do this, contact us. We have a very streamlined report we
can prepare for you. We can also set-up a competitor-monitoring portal with the appropriate
Google alerts, RSS feeds, etc.
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