“I’m constantly feeling anxious that my competition is gaining ground, particularly on the Internet, and they’re going to outperform my company before I know it. I realize that in today’s age, you can’t keep your eye off the competition, whether it’s from next door, across the world or on the web. I’m losing sleep over this, but I don’t know where to start.”
Ivan: This is a typical case of “competitus infolackius.” Depending on your condition, I’d recommend several “web pills” to try for a week and then choose those that work best to keep this dangerous disease at bay.
- Monday: alexa.com will help you determine your own site’s traffic rank on the Internet and lets you compare it with your competition.
- Tuesday: linkpopularity.com will help you see who is linking to your competition’s website. You can also test it on yourself. Generally, the more quality links you have the healthier shape you’re in.
- Wednesday: google.com/trends will help you see if your competitor’s health is on the upswing or downturn. Type in the name of any product, person or company and see if people search them more or less than in the past. For example, you’ll see that iPhone has now outperformed BlackBerry in terms of search popularity.
- Thursday: google.com/insights/search is another Google treatment. It helps you compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories and time frames.
- Friday: archive.org allows you to see previous versions of your competitor’s website. Maybe you want to see what products used to be offered or perhaps who used to be on their staff.
- Saturday: mikes-marketing-tools.com/ranking-reports will show where your competitors rank on search engines like Google, Yahoo, BING or AOL.
- Sunday: Watch the Canucks, go for a stroll, even have a beer or coffee or a slice of your favourite cheesecake. You have done a good job keeping an eye on your competitors Monday to Saturday so you have at least one day to relax!
Cyri: The good news is that, like most of the other medications we recommend, this one is free. There’s no reason staying in good business health has to cost an arm and a leg!
But Ivan, I think you forgot some of your favourite folk remedies.
Ivan: How could I forget? This is one that surprisingly few people use to their advantage, but it can be very powerful in alleviating “competitus infolackius.”
Chop a bunch of onions, crush some garlic, mix them in a bag and attach it to your socks for a few days. While you’re doing that, sign up for an RSS reader such as Google.com/reader and subscribe to your competitors’ RSS feeds. If you have never used this RSS treatment before, a good video resource is commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english. In a nutshell, if you see any RSS feeds on your competitors’ sites – usually identified by a square orange broadcast style icon – just click on them, copy the URL, click on the add subscription button in Google Reader, paste in the URL and you’re off to the races. Instead of having to keep going back to your competitors’ websites to see what’s new, all the latest updates will get sent to you automatically.
Actually, this works just fine without the onions and garlic part but people never believe me when I say RSS alone can make such a difference.
Cyri: I also have some ancient healing tips to share.
Whenever there is a full moon, you can gain special insight on your competitors.
Go to dnscoop.com and discover when your competitor’s website went live and how old its domain name is. Check out domaintools.com to see who the owner of any domain name is, where their site is hosted and how many times the domain name changed hands.
Ivan: I find these tools work even when there isn’t a full moon, but it does seem magical how you can get so much information with just a few mouse clicks.
Cyri: And finally, if you want to learn what’s going on in real time on social media, don’t forget to use search.twitter.com to see who is tweeting about your competition in real time. There are also other social media tracking tools that you can put to use to monitor just about anything, including your competition: twellow.com, sproutsocial.com, topsy.com, wefollow.com, tweepi.com, backtype.com and websitegrader.com. New social media medications are being developed pretty much daily, but these will get you started.
Ivan: These treatment strategies should help you control your symptoms and soon your anxiety will be replaced with confidence, but keep your eyes open and get to know many more tools. Check out great resources for competitive research such as tools.seobook.com/competitive-research-tools/ or ci.trellian.com.
Cyri: You don’t get in good shape by just going to the gym for one week per year. The real key is to regularly use these tools to prevent problems in the future. Think of our recommendations more like vitamins that become a daily habit.
Cost: Free for the Monday-to-Saturday prescriptions. Some of the social media tools and others listed on seobook.com and trellian.com will require you to dig into your wallet a bit.
Ivan: The generic name is really just competitive intelligence. The only difference here is that you are doing your research 100% online. As far as alternative medicine, if you can’t discipline yourself to take these pills regularly, you can always set up Google Alerts (google.com/alerts) and get Google to regularly send you news about your competition.
Cyri: The general problem with most web-tracking tools is their accuracy and reliability. Most of the above tools, like Alexa, use statistical estimates; by definition they’re not completely reliable. Yet this is still better than not having any information at all. One way to address the reliability issue is by using more than one tool for each task or by combining your own insights with those that you get from web tools. Also, don’t forget that monitoring your competition is useless if you don’t use information to improve your strategy and decision-making. Don’t fall into “analysis paralysis.”
Cyri Jones teaches entrepreneurship, project management and information technology at BCIT and Capilano University and is the co-founder of ZedPress.com. He blogs at 24posts.com. Ivan Surjanovic is a marketing faculty at Capilano University and CEO of iPower Lab. He blogs at whereispuck.com and at bizpharmacy.com.
