In most cases the success of a business is synonymous with beating the competition. However, in order to defeat your competitors in the market, you must be aware of where they stand. Seeing customers line up to use your competitors goods or services and not yours is disheartening and a sign that they may be doing better than you, but it doesn’t give you a true picture in facts and figures of what is truly going on behind the scenes. This is why you need to start researching and form an action plan.
Thanks to the world wide web and its vast and passionate community of programmers and developers, there is easily accessible software that can help you monitor your company’s and the competitions online performance. These tools acquire useful data from the internet that may very well help you solve all your problems if analyzed strategically.
Here is an introduction to some excellent online tools that might come in handy in helping you beat your competition.
Marketing Grader
I love this tool for its simplicity. If you don’t think you have the technological ability to be able to gauge the performance of your competitors through graphs and keyword usage then this little tool is for you. It is generally seen as the ideal beginner spying tool for all businesses.
What this monitoring tool does is keep and display an overall score of your competitor’s presence and performance like a strict math teacher. So if you have a really basic understanding of how the reputation of a businesses is manifested online, a neat score out of a hundred will definitely give you an idea of what you are up against.
The final score is based on the SEO strength, lead generation ability, blogging success and social media activity of your competitor. You can keep an eye on their changing strategy which also affects their score either way. You can of course also use this valuable tool for your own business as well. With Marketing Grader you can keep an eye on yours and your competitor’s success in,
- Usage of SEO techniques
- Social activity
- Blogging
- Lead generation
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is awesome. It is extremely simple and easy to use and it sends useful information right into your inbox.
‘What kind of information’ you ask? Every time the name of your competition comes up, you will be alerted, this is not only limited to keyword searches through search engines, you also receive alerts when their website is accessed through a link.
With this tool, you can monitor the strength of your competitor’s presence with the help of keywords. It is up to you how you want to gauge their online existence. Some of the best ways in which businesses utilize this tool is by monitoring:
- The opponents’ backlinks
- Reference to competitors’ businesses through social media
- Keyword search results.
Topsy
If you are simply concerned with how your competition is fairing on Twitter, then Topsy is the only tool that you are going to need. All the tweets related to yours anyone elses business, even from a decade ago, can be traced through this tool. Use this valuable information to draw up a performance chart of your competition; analyze the pattern and see what has made them click in the market for all these years.
What is worth mentioning here is that you can avail the service of this website for free as well. Nevertheless if you are serious about jump starting your own business’s performance, for around $12,000.00 annually, the PRO version will help you get unlimited data regarding your competitors and real time results. So every time, the company gets tweeted about, you get notified immediately.
iSpionage
This tool already sounds mischievous doesn’t it? With this tool, you can actually trace the keywords that perform best for your competitor. These keywords are not limited to organic searches alone, but also work for PPC searches. iSpionage can also gather and display information about how much the competition has spent on keyword development campaigns.
This tool also shows the most successful ad copy of your competitor and you can compare all of the numerical data with the help of a graph. So, in a nutshell, here is what iSpionage does for you:
- Analyzes the most effective keywords of your competitors from organic search results
- Analyzes the most effective keywords of your competitors for PPC searches
- Analyzes how much your competitors have paid for organic and PPC keywords
- Displays the most successful ad copy of the competition
- Displays numeric data for comparison in a graph
- Majestic SEO
This tool is for people who are solely interested in the link profile of their competitors. Basically this tool is used to download the complete link profile of your competitor’s websites. A complete link profile could mean potentially having more than a thousand backlinks at your fingertips. Once downloaded and imported into your system, you can use it or slice it up for analysis as you please.
These ‘spying’ tools are extremely helpful in determining the status of your competitor’s success and for gauging and monitoring your own as well. However, you must be aware that these tools are available to everyone!
