Spying on Your Competition

In retail, there are the huge 800-pound gorillas that you don’t compete with – Walmart, Target, Macy’s and more. Then, there are the smaller guys that have built their presence on the internet for the same niche as yours. These are your competitors.

If you type in a keyword related to what you’re selling, more often than not, they show up in the same results pages as you do. Sometimes their entries even rank higher than yours. I’m sure as an online merchant you’ve found this annoying.

If you really want to be a bigger player in your niche, you need to start outperforming your competition. Aside from trying to rank your website for targeted keywords via SEO and paid search campaigns, it’s time to do some spying.

Here are some tips and tricks on how to find out what your competitors are targeting and why they’re ranking better than you:

• Ctrl+U – This command brings out any website’s source code. You can get the same results by clicking View in your browser menu and selecting Page Source . What good does this do? It gives you access to their meta tags, namely the meta descriptions and the keywords they are targeting for the page.
• Set Alerts – Both Yahoo and Google have them. Aside from setting alerts for your own brand name, set exact matches for your top competitors as well so you always know what your potential customers are saying about them.
• Use backlink checkers like Yahoo! Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/). This gives you a sneakpeak with regards to the number of pages they have in their site, their internal link structure, but most importantly, which sites are linking to them. You can actual target the same set of sites for your link building efforts.
• Join their mailing list – most websites get in contact with their customers via a mailing list. This gives them the venue to discuss the latest and greatest on their brand. Be on those lists and you won’t need to do much legwork to find out what your competitors are up to.
• SpyFu – This neat little tool gives you an insight on the paid campaigns they’re after. You could find out how much they are bidding on particular keywords. It may not be 100% accurate but it’s the closest thing you have to see their paid campaign strategy.

Luckily, spying on your online competitors does not require much cloak and dagger work. Information is easily accessible and the data you harvest is easy to act upon.

Happy snooping!