Monitor Your Competition With Free Online Tools
June 29, 2010 in Management, Tips & Advice by marijana
In today's competitive business environment, no company should remain ignorant of their competitors and how they operate and market their business. Obtaining information on the businesses you compete with allows you to always be a step ahead of them. You will be able to determine their strengths and weaknesses and use this knowledge to your advantage.
Monitoring your competition is essential for developing business strategies which will allow you to achieve the competitive edge, and fortunately, there are many online tools available to do competitor espionage through some simple and most importantly, legal techniques.
There are tools that you can use to learn about, for example, traffic volume of your competitor's website, details about their domain, mentions on social media sites, or receive alerts when they are mentioned in the press. Although this information may seem trivial to some, every little detail on your competition counts as it allows you to compare your performance with theirs. Many of these tools are available for free, so you'll only have to invest some time.
Here are some of the best free tools available online for tracking and monitoring your competition:
Yahoo! Site Explorer - Site Explorer allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. View the most popular pages from any site including your competitors, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page.
Compete Search Analytics -Enter a site or a category to receive a list of keywords that refer traffic to it, or enter a keyword to get a list of sites it refers traffic to.
Statbrain - Using different sources, Statbrain's algorithm estimates how many visitors a website attracts based on offsite factors such as 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, so you can compare your results with those of your competitors.
FeedCompare - If you use Feedburner to track your RSS subscribers you can compare the size of your feed to your competitors.
Xinu Returns - This is a great tool that gives statistics on website SEO, so you can learn how well your competitors' sites are doing in major search engines such as Google and Yahoo, social bookmarking sites, backlinks, etc. You can use this information to create strategy to outperform your competitors.
Google Trends For Websites - Google Trends for Websites gives you insights into the traffic and geographic visitation patterns of your website. You can compare your data with up to four of your competitors' websites and view related sites and top searches for each one.
Websitegrader -You can use this tool to measure the marketing effectiveness of your website. When grading a website, this tool looks at parameters such as website traffic, SEO, social popularity, website performance, and so forth. Websitegrader has a feature that allows you to compare your site with other websites, and see how you perform compared to the competition.
Google Alerts - You can use Google Alerts to set up searches for your compatitors company name and receive email notification on the latest mentions in Google search results. You can set up to 1,000 alerts per account, which allows you to monitor all your keywords and competitors.
SocialMention - SocialMention allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about your competitors and your company across different social media sites and blogs in real-time. It will tell you how many times a keyword you enter was mentioned and you can subscribe to recieve a free daily email alerts of your company or your competitors.
P.S. Are you 'Advertising' or 'Marketing' ?
Ask me the Difference?
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