Finding Public Information

In the world of business, knowing your competitors’ strategies before competing is crucial in plans to win the battle. With this knowledge, you can always stay ahead of your competitors.  The Internet is a gateway to an array of competitive intelligence.  Let me share a few with you.

SpyFu.com

SpyFu allows you to spy on your online competitors. All you have to do is type in the keywords to know what your competitors are up to. This competitive research tool monitors approximately 4.5 million domains. Be prepared to find information how much your competitors are paying for and advertisement and the total number of clicks received for their ads.  And the best part is you get to enjoy this information at no cost.

Google Alerts

Again at no cost, employ Google to be your faithful spy.  Sign-up for Google Alerts and enter the keywords to what you would want to track. Thereafter, based on your preferred notification frequency you will have updated competitive intelligence sent to your mailbox. Not only does it monitor your competitor’s movement, you could also have first hand knowledge about what is being said about your own company.

Way Back Machine

Way Back Machine, a tool that allows you to see the history of your competitors. Observe what has changed and the things that have stayed consistent through the years. You may be able to gain insights to what strategy works and what does not. You can also review the changes of your own company. This is one convenient way of obtaining internal information when the predecessors have left the company. Learning from experience will save you from unnecessary strategy misfortunes.

Niche Watch

By typing detailed technical information on Niche Watch, you will get the top 20-competitor analysis.  The analysis includes information such as the number of backlinks to the page and to the domain, number of pages indexed in Google, keyword occurrences and page rank, all in anchor, all in title and text rank for both domain and webpage information

About the author
Andreas co-founded Xavier Media® in 1996 and has since been involved in all kinds of development, marketing and making money online.