Competitive analysis is important to any business strategy. Knowing what your competitors are doing and how they’re pricing and marketing their products will help you figure out how to market your own products. Luckily, there are many online tools that can help you get a look (or spy) on what your competitors are doing.
- Google their company, brand and product names.
- Google any keywords associated with their company, your company and your industry.
- Use Twitter’s search for their company, brand and product names (also important keywords).
- Search on Facebook for their company, brand and product names (and important keywords).
- Search Alexa for their company websites to see some traffic stats (estimated).
- Check out their site profile on Compete to see traffic (estimated).
- Use Compete to compare their site to yours or to other competitor websites.
- Run Website Grader on their site — can also compare yours to theirs.
- Run Twitter Grader on their Twitter feed.
- Run Blog Grader on their blog(s).
- Check out their site(s) with WooRank.
- Use Google Trends to check stats on their site and then compare with others.
- Set up Google Alerts for competitor’s company, product and brand names to monitor for mentions.
- Add feeds for company names, etc. into TweetDeck, HootSuite or Seesmic to monitor mentions on Twitter.
Do you spy on your competition? What tools and tactics do you use?
(photo by DaveFayram)