Competitor
analysis and research
The nature of the
web makes it particularly easy to examine your competitors. Here are
some techniques:
1)
search on likely terms (product type, company names, model numbers,
trademarks) in Yahoo and Google
to locate your competitors. You can also use UK
Info Disc or
UK Info Disc Pro to get contact details on target businesses in
the UK.
2) on your browser
click View and then Source, to look at the code behind the page, examine
keywords and meta tags used
3) if they use redirection
and frames to mask where the site is hosted or hide the code, then put:
"view-source:" in your browser before their URL eg: view-source:http://www.yahoo.com
4) check out when
and who registered the site by putting the domain name into a registration
site such as those listed at Domain
Names
5) check out the
company behind the website by entering its name (or likely name) into
the database at Companies House (for
the UK) similar agencies exist in other countries. If you want to get
details on the directors you can pay a small fee and get an online report
6) see who links
to them by putting the word "link:" before their URL into
the search box in Google or AltaVista.
See who, how, and why they link. You can try to displace these links
or find similar with which to link
7) having found
out their address and directors put their telephone number or post code
into Google and find out what else happens
at that location. Put post code into Streetmap,
to get a large scale map and (in most cases) an online aerial photograph
8) search on the
directors names, and see what else they are upto, and where and what
press coverage they get
8) if the competitor
site has a news group, join it, and keep up to date with their activities.
Contact them and ask questions about their site.
9) if your competitor
has an online shop, buy something and check out their processes, terms
and customer service support
10) if your competitor
has an affiliate programme, join it , and see how it works, see what
products sell. You can run short term ads on Google
Ads that could link to the affiliate tracking URL, to see how they
perform.
11) install Alexa
on your browser. This is a sampling tool that alows you to get an idea
of how many visitors a site receives, how many links it has, and suggestions
on other popular similar sites
12) use Tracerlock
to identify new web sites that are picked up on a particular search
term
13) use the tools
(especially their "Swiss Army" toolkit) at Spyonit
for general intelligence gathering and monitoring of incoming links
14) use Netmind
to be updated be email on changes at a competitor's (or any other) web
pages
Of course if its
this easy to do this to your competitors you may wish to assume they
can do the same with your web site.
