Ever wonder why you’re not making sales despite the sizzling webcopy and the affiliate army promoting your product? That means some other blokes may be reeling your customers. Now don’t fret. Your solution is to do a bit of sleuthing. None of the cloak and dagger subterfuge of course- a bit of web snooping is enough. Peek into the competition and you’ll be armed with intel that can snare some biting fish.
Check out the cool tools I normally unleash to do my competitive landscape snooping.
• Search results – Use the search engines to discern what kinds of sites rank for your desired
keywords. Look into their competitive advantages have. Is there anything you can mimic or do better?
your own brand?
• Top Ten Analysis Tool – Fire up this tool to uncover link profile data, site age info, and
data about citations from social news sites over the top of Google’s or Yahoo!’s search results to give you a more complete profile of the competitive landscape. http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool/
• SEO for Firefox – This free plugin provides the same information as the previous tool but uses the Firefox web browser as your interface. Check out mozilla.org for tool download. Results come out in multiple pages.
• Alexa – Deploy Alexa to mine for traffic trends. Please understand this is HEAVILY biased toward
internet marketing and webmaster related websites. http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=www.connectedinternet.co.uk
• Compete – Compete churns up data similar to Alexa, but is not partial to internet marketing
related websites http://snapshot.compete.com/xtrememind.com/
You’ll love the accompanying search analytics tool http://searchanalytics.compete.com/
which allows you to view keywords that competing businesses rank for.
• Quantcast – I love quantcast in that it spits out deep demographic information. Imagine getting an idea of the age, sex, income class and race of your surfers! Visit http://quantcast.com/
• Google Trends – With GT, you’ll discover competing brands and markets that are eating into your mindshare and search volume. Visit http://www.google.com/trends?q=blog+reviews
• Blog search and news search engines – Discover in moments if bloggers and news
outfits discuss your competition favorably. This knowledge helps you enhance your services.
Are you ready to spy, 007?
