10
Ways to Spy on Your Competition (They're spying on you!)
"Maximise Your Website Traffic & Conversion Rate with MKLINK"
So
you want to stay ahead of your competition?
Of course
you do! So keep an eye on them!
Half the battle of most businesses is constantly monitoring your competitors.
If you ran a supermarket - you'd send someone to pop round to the supermarket
down the road to have a butchers' at their products, prices and offers.
(Of course this happens in just a lot more depth than this but you get
the point)
By being
in the public domain - all your services are available for scrutiny by
your competition - and so it makes sense to get the best competitive advantage
you can by having a system of regularly monitoring THEIR websites.
How should you monitor Your Competitors?
Naturally, there are loads of things you can monitor and loads of ways
to do it.
(There is plenty of software available to help)
However, assuming it is YOUR business that you're trying to improve,
I'd suggest making the effort to do monitor visually what your main
competition is doing in person - on a regular basis, rather than leaving
everything to software alone.
I suggest
this because it keeps you personally involved and seeing your
competition doing well will motivate you to spend more time developing
your
own internet marketing strategies.
To be a little
more scientific about it than simply looking at their websites and
wondering what they're up to, it's a good idea to put the things that
you monitor
on a spreadsheet or journal of some kind, so that you can track changes
over time
- else otherwise you won't be able to measure properly.
Checkout my new training system today - http://www.mklink.com/training/
What
should you monitor?
Well, it's specific for each business is different but here's a few ideas
:
1) Who should you monitor?
In an ideal world, you'd have all the time you need to monitor
everyone in
your market place. In the real world of course you'll want to select a
few key
competitors and decide to monitor them at certain frequencies. Occasionally
cast the net a bit wider to see any newbies on the block.
2) Who's linking to them?
You can of course see who's linking to them by typing link:http://www.thirwebsiteaddress.co.uk-or.com
into the search
bar of Google and listing the results.
Tip:You might want to contact the people they're linking to and see if
they want
to link to you as well (or instead)
3) Where do they appear in the search engines?
(for YOUR chosen key phrases)
Discover valuable information about where they exist in the real-estate
of rankings.
Either type in directly to a search engine or use Web Trends tools
(we use it - www.webtrends.com)
4) Where are they advertising?
Less easy to measure but it gives you an idea of their marketing
strategy.
You can checkout the more obvious ones such as Google Pay per click, Yell,
Classified ads etc. by simply trolling them regularly.
5) Competitive Intelligence
This means actually spending a bit of time on their website and
looking at how
they're positioning their products and pricing plus their new products/services
they
may be launching (or indeed old ones they no longer support)
6) Meta Tags
Visit their website and right click on it. Click where it says
'view source'
or 'source code'. There's a load of HTML here but don't worry about that.
Just lookout (usually near the top) for the lines that say 'Meta Keywords
='
or 'Meta Description =' and notice what descriptive words they're using.
It gives you an insight into what they want to be found for in the search
engines.
(You should also scan the text of the main website anyway for the same
reason)
7) Monitor Domains & Trademarks
Cool site - www.domaintools.com - tells you all about a domain name and
can
alert you when someone's using a key phrase(e.g. trademark) that you want
to
keep an eye one. You can see who owns the domain, what servers they're
using
- if they're blacklisted etc.
8)
Google Page Rank.
This is Google's measure(0=useless, 10=perfect, 2 or 3=average)
of your website's popularity. A high page rank means that your competitor's
site is well ranked in their search engine as they value the website highly.
This is in turn a function of inbound links(See 1) For a slightly different
service - but offering good popularity info
checkout www.alexa.com
9)
Newsletter/Brochures
An obvious one but as usual most people ignore it. Sign up for their newsletters
or free stuff and see what they're offering.
Like I said, there's software that enables you to automatically track
a competitors'
website which can email or text you when they've changes their website,
blog or
inbound links etc. We can give you a useful list...
10) Who made their website?
Very often there's a link to the web design company. If you're cheeky
enough
you could simply ask them what the website cost to produce and other details.
(I'm not advocating anything else here...)
Want more information?
Checkout
my new training system today(before your competitors do ;-)http://www.mklink.com/training/
'till next time,
Mike
Knight.
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