Quick and Easy Competitive Content Research

In my talks with business groups and others, especially those who aren’t as tech savvy, one thing always comes up: a lack of knowledge on how to perform competitive research online. The companies that have a website and can get around the Internet will sometimes check out their competitors websites, but that’s about it. The others don’t do anything. Either they are too busy, don’t care or don’t know how.

In these challenging economic  times, where small businesses are failing right and left, it’s more important than ever to know what your competitors are doing and how they are using their web content to, in effect, take business away from you.

So what should you do if you are a small business and want to “spy” on competitors?

• Review their websites – Do this on a regular basis, and don’t just jump around from page to page glossing over the copy. Really take a look. Read the content word for word, see what they are using to rope people in. Use an alias email and sign up for their free stuff, and dig through all of this in detail. White papers, webinar recordings, newsletter, whatever. If they have this type of content, you’ll find out pretty quickly what they are up to. If they don’t, well then at least go through their site map, take a look at the pages and see what you can learn. If they have a blog, get on their feed. (see point # 4 below)
• Check out their keyword phrases and Meta tags – related to the bullet above. Go to each page of their site, right click on the page, select “view source code” and look for the words “META” near the top of the page. You want to look for the Title tag and Description tag. This is where you’ll see their important keyword phrases, notice if the Meta tags are different for every page on their site (good for them) or the same (probably good for you). Next, Google these phrases as see if they come up. And see if you come up to!
• Check their links – Go to Yahoo and search “Links competitordomainname.com.” Using this method, you can check out linkbait data, see what important sites they are connected to and where you might be able to get a link from as well.
• If they have them, follow your competitors’ feeds – You can get all kinds of information this way, plus it comes to you automatically. This makes it very easy.  And if they have a Twitter page, check their feed there too.  Lots of great stuff can be found in “The big T”, the most popular social media tool out there right now.
• Use Compete to review their traffic trends – This great tool will graph your competitors traffic over time vs. yours.  If they are rocking and rolling, see how they’re driving traffic to their site. What can you do in response?

And my final point…notice I say “if” they have a blog and “if” they have a Twitter account. I think those of us in the SEO/SEM/Designer and Marketing worlds forget that there are a lot of companies out there that aren’t that savvy when it comes to the web. That’s one big reason why they need us. In fact, I blogged about this topic a while back. We all need to do more to communicate with these types of businesses and help them get up to speed. These are the ones that we see going out of business and who can benefit the most from the tactics mentioned in this post.

So I bounce this one to you – What other free and easy competitive research tactics/strategies would you suggest?