3 Ways to Keep Tabs on the Competition

Over the years, I have worked with clients in many different industries, with different budgets, and often very different goals. But no matter the client or industry, one question always seems to come up in our initial discussions: "How do we find out what Company X is doing?"

Every business is aware of their top competitors – those brands that have market share and are doing well or those who are in hot pursuit of your success. While creative entrepreneurs are more interested in building their own businesses than looking over their shoulders, it can be helpful to learn from the success of others, and find ways to differentiate yourself.

Technology makes it easy to find out what others in your category are doing, where they are putting their marketing attention, and over time, what is working for them.

Here are 3 essential (and free!) ways to keep tabs on competitors that you can start using today.

1. How Do You Compete? Traffic Analysis Sites

Vendors typically don't publish their site traffic or how they attract new buyers, but a lot of this information is available online. Sites like Alexa.com and Compete.com use toolbars installed on a segment of machines to help you guesstimate the traffic on any site. These sites also track the top referring sites (the sites where most of their traffic is coming from) and even the top keywords people are searching to get to them. This can help you focus your SEO efforts and even test some key terms using Google Adwords. The numbers are not 100% accurate, but are close enough to give you a good idea to work with.

2. Are Your Ears Burning? Find Out Who's Talking About You (And Them!)

I recommend using Google Alerts in a post about tracking your own brand, but it is just as effective at tracking your competitors online mentions. Set up an alert for each one of the top competitors in your category to see where they are being talked about and what they are doing to get people to their sites. You can also use sites like the new Workstreamer.com to follow all news, social mentions, and traffic data for your competitors in one place. Workstreamer aggregates mentions from many different sources and creates a customized alert channel or dashboard to make it easy to track competitors on a daily basis.

3. Links: Who's Boosting Them To The Top?

The internet is all about reputation: the more quality sites linking to you, the more likely you have developed a solid reputation online and will benefit from the traffic that brings. You can get a view into your competitors' linking strategies by knowing one simple search operator: "link:"

Go to google.com and in the search box type link: www.competitorsitehere.com. This will give you a long list of sites linking to your competitor and helping to raise their reputation. Click on the links and do a find for the competitor's url to see what the link looks like. If it is a link in a list of many and the site accepts advertisers, chances are it is a paid link. If your competitor also linked back to the site, it is probably a reciprocal link obtained by asking the site owner if they can trade links. More than likely, many links you will find will come from the competitor commenting on blogs, one of the easist ways to get links. Pay attention to the comments and see if a similar strategy might work for you.

Tracking competitors is a great way to find new ways to grow your business. Don't waste time coveting others' success. Find out what's working for them and test it yourself!

Molly Fisher has more than 10 years experience building brands and social networks for leading companies such as Schooldude.com and Burt's Bees as well as several other clients. She currently runs Craft Ideas Weekly Facebook Community, the Craft Ideas Weekly Blog, and works as an eCommerce and Social Marketing Consultant in Chapel Hill, NC.

Photo courtesy of Tambako.