Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Online Competitive Intelligence

One of the best things about search engine optimization is the intelligence you can obtain from it on your competitors.

For websites, the battle for clicks from Googlers is brutal.
Rankings go up and down throughout the week. Every day more and more web pages appear. Google changes its algorithms all the time.

If you can't keep track of your competitors, how do you expect to out-rank them in Google’s search results? Explore who your competitors are in the online world and what they're doing to promote themselves.

"Competitive Intelligence is defined as the process of obtaining and analyzing competitive information from publicly available sources to help achieve the objectives of the organization." Source: Wikipedia

Your online competitors may or may not be the same as your offline competitors. First you need to find out who your competition is. Do a search in Google for a term or terms that you want to rank for – the top spots (disregard sponsored links) are your competitors.

How you can gather online competitive intelligence
  • Read their websites thoroughly
  • See who is linking to them
  • Find out how much traffic they are getting
  • Identify their key phrases
  • Find out their Google PageRank
Apply what you discover from your competitive intelligence. Use this new knowledge to increase your online marketing success and your profits.

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