With the amount of Internet communication and public information available today, it is absolutely okay to legally monitor your competitors and their business management styles and marketing strategies. With the nature of competition in today’s economy, your business management model has to stay a step ahead by watching what other companies are doing and seeing what works or doesn’t in your industry. Here are twelve tools designed specifically to help you reach this goal:
1. Most important is the simple Google search.
Use the name of your industry to find local competition and use their names to see what they’re doing.
2. SpyFu
A business management tool that can show what keywords are working for the competition.
3. Google Trends
A free service that allows you to tinker with different variations of keywords and see what kind of results they bring up.
4. Google Alerts
A free service that tells you when a competitor is mentioned on the Internet.
5. Alexa
A business management program that shows you how your website ranks compared to your competitors’ sites.
6. Compete
More in depth by also showing where your competitors are finding their customers and explaining how they use their social media platforms successfully.
7. SEO Book
Provides information on companies with similar page titles, tags and keywords to your own.
8. Internet Archive
A site that stores old web pages so you can see how your competitor has changed their marketing and sales campaign over the years, as well as their business management models, product descriptions and pricing adjustments.
9. Domain Tools
Can tell you how long your competitors’ web site has been open and what other websites are owned by the same company.
10. Open Site Explorer
Useful for determining what sites are linked to your competitors and can give an insight into where they are drawing their business from.
11. Keyword Spy
Provides information about your competitors’ ads and keywords, and what they spend for it.
12. Reference USA
A way to monitor relevant forums and chat rooms to see what your potential customers have to say about the business management practices within your industry.
Use these tools to stay in touch with what are common business management practices in your industry. This gives you the opportunity to not just be average, but add your own policies to make your company outshine the rest.
