Technology Prescriptions to Stay on Top of Your Competition

(As originally published in “Business in Vancouver“)

Symptom

“I’m constantly feeling anxious that my competition is gaining ground, particularly on the Internet, and they are 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.” 

Recommended Medications

Ivan: This is a typical case of “competitus infolackius”.  Depending on your condition, I would like to recommend several “web pills” to try for a week and then choose those that work best for you going forward to keep this dangerous disease at bay.

Monday: www.alexa.com ­­– We often recommend this tool.  Alexa.com will help you determine your own site’s traffic rank on the Internet, and let you compare it with your competition.

Tuesday: www.linkpopularity.com – This tool will help you see who is linking to your competitions’ website.  You can test it on yourself as well.  Generally, the more quality links you have the healthier shape you’re in.

Wednesday: www.google.com/trends – This tool 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 will see that iPhone has now outperformed Blackberry in terms of search popularity!

Thursday: www.google.com/insights/search – This is another Google treatment.  It helps you compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories and time frames.

Friday: www.archive.org – You can see previous versions of your competitor’s website with this one. Maybe you want to see what products used to be offered or perhaps who used to be on their staff.

Saturday: www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/ranking-reports – This will show 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 favorite cheese cake.  You have done a good job keeping an eye on your competitors Monday to Saturday so you have at least one day to just relax!

Cyri: The good news is that the medication is free, like most of the other medications we recommend.  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 favorite 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 in a bag and attach to your socks for a few days.  While you are doing that, sign up for a RSS reader such as Google.com/reader and subscribe to your competitor’s RSS feeds.  If you have never used this RSS treatment before, a good video resource is: www.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 www.dnscoop.com and discover when your competitor’s website went live and how old their domain name is. Check out www.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: www.twellow.com, www.sproutsocial.com, www.topsy.com, www.wefollow.com, www.tweepi.com, www.backtype.com, and www.websitegrader.com.  New social media medications are being developed pretty much daily but these will get you started.

Prognosis

Ivan: These treatment strategies should help you control your symptoms and soon you will see your anxiety 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.

Future Management of This Condition

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 where it becomes 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.

Generic Name & Alternative Medicine

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 on a regular basis, you can always set up Google Alerts (google.com/alerts) and get Google to send you news about your competition on a regular basis.

Precautions / Warnings

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 are 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 take that information to improve your strategy and decision making… don’t fall into “analysis paralysis”.

Cyri & Ivan’s Medication Rating:

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