Found a cool tool this week while reading a magazine I picked up at the grocery store. This tool lets you get email updates whenever a site is updated. Now, they probably assume you’ll use their tool for keeping up on news, or even finding out when your favorite blog has a new post. I see this as excellent spy gear!
Never underestimate the value of buying up magazines every month in your industry of course and writing them off. They’re perfect for finding little gems like this one. Follow That Page lets you do just that. It emails you the second there’s an update.
If you ask me, that’s pretty cool! I’m going to set it up with my favorite industry blogs so I don’t miss updates. Some of the blogs I visit don’t have updates too often. With blogs like mine, you can just sign up to the newsletter and get the same content + bonuses, but some blogs have no newsletter or signup features.
Before I go and reveal every juicy strategy to discovering the tools necessary to dig into every element of a competitor’s online marketing campaign, let me go over the elements we’re looking for. I’ll show you with the tools I’m about to reveal, you can see EVERY element of a competitor’s online marketing campaign.
First off… If you knew…
Where they were getting their traffic from
What terms they ranked for
What keywords they pay for in PPC
What keywords they’ve INCREASED or decreased spending on
What landing pages they’re landing them on (and what copy testing they’ve done)
What social media marketing they’ve done
Who links to them and what press releases have gone out
How old their site is
Alexa, and other web stats…
Would you not easily be able to find unsaturated markets, or repeat successes of your competitors? I think you would! What if I also showed you how to have Google alert you about your competitors, even in the middle of the night?!?
Keywords From Competitor PPC Campaigns
To this day, the best way to find anything online is via keyword search using the top 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN/Bing) and that’s still how people find most things online. Chances are, if i asked you who your top competitor is, you’d already know. Or, at least you would probably know who the top business in your industry is online.
Keyword Spy Pro can download the entire Google Adwords (PPC advertising) campaign from a website, the landing pages they used, the ads they used and even the organic keywords they rank for. You could easily spot weaknesses in their rankings, in their ad campaigns, or simply duplicate them for the exact same successes.
Using the example above, we we’re able to get 50,000 ads from enterprise.com, 14,064 keywords and 560 competitors as well as around 50 of their top landing pages, their ad spend and ad budgets and pricing as well. Using this data, you could easily find which keywords and which landing pages have had increased budgets recently and use those as your blueprint.
Landing Pages & History
All the tools I’m about to show you reveal different landing pages. How long has that page been live? How much editing has been done? How far back does that go? You see, if you could tell that they’ve tried using the word "free" in their headline, or "cheaper" but ended up using the word "affordable" and sticking with that for the last year… Perhaps you wouldn’t need to do the same testing!
Using archive.org’s impressive spiders, and other big search engines have amazing cache tools you can use to find old pages, examine changes over time etc.
Social Media & Visibility
Wouldn’t you love to see a snapshot of a site and instantly know… "Hey, are the using any social media? Is anyone talking about them?" or what about just finding out just how much of an authority they really are? I love this tool, I hunted for years for something like it so i’m sure glad that I found it. It’s called SiteYogi , and it proposes to be the spiritual leader/guru of finding out how YOUR site is doing. However, *I* use it for digging up info about my competitors not my own sites!
This tool shows you:
Syndication
Validations
Social Bookmarks
Ranking
Backlinks
Indexed pages
And way more!!!
Taking a snapshot and comparing it to multiple competitors can really show you what your up against, dig up press releases, etc. It really shows you how much social, news & other powerful resources are being used!
Digging up Organic Search Data
There’s really no tool that compares with quite such detail and precision than that of SEOBook’s "Seo For Firefox Plugin". I’m a huge fan of it, and the tool to be quite honest has allowed me to extrapolate huge reports for corporate clients and provide juicy detailed competitive analysis that ultimately lead to the distruction of major top 10 results! Meaning we were able to get a #4 spot for "Car rental" using Google at one time just with this kind of data alone.
There’s no way I could list every feature this thing will reveal but let me explain how it works. First, you install the plugin into Firefox (Duh!) and then, select your settings in the tools menu of Firefox, enable it by clicking a little SEO logo in the bottom right of the browser and perform a search in Google. It instantly brings back things like the PR of each site, cache date, yahoo links, .edu links, age, alexa directories, diggs etc. I’m not listing it all.. but It’s wild, and quite simply the best tool on the market.
All this data can be found anywhere, and that’s true. However, directly against the search results themselves? No. More so, I *love* the export to CSV feature where you can actually excel sheet all this data. Absolutely amazing.
Competitor Link Data for SEO
They’ve got 24,000 links? What kind of links are they? What anchor text and where are they on the web? Ah, for that my dear friend I show you a tool that is the best at sleuthing out exactly which links are where and how they’re set up. The very best, in my humble opinion.
They’re coming out with a new version… That’s why to use it currently, you have to go to classic.linkdiagnosis.com, but I suspect if the classic version was the best link analysis tool I’ve ever seen, the next one will be even greater!
Search Results in Other Countries
Using redflymarketing’s special firefox extension, you can even observe what other countries see in their Google box. Being based out of Canada, I often use this tool to see if the ranking boosts I’m seeing are better in the USA than Canada or vice-versa for my clients. It lets you see other countries too.
Very powerful for seeing where your competitors are doing better or worse in the rankings, but also other competitors that may be focused more on US, UK, Canada that are marketing to a global audience.
Monitoring, Tracking and Further Analysis
Is it possible to watch all your competitors in a given market, even while you sleep? YES! Today I’m going to show you how you can monitor what they do, pretty much live to some degree. First off, I’d suggest looking at Google Alerts but setting it up to monitor your competitors using type – Comprehensive, how often – Once a day, and deliver to your email address with the search term either their domain, their brand or the product your concerned about, or all of the above.
There are other monitoring tools, but Google’s lets you go back and delete or change preferences of these alerts using your Google account. There’s many email alert systems that you’ll be stuck subscribed to for years that you’d pretty much have to cancel your email account and get a new one to get out of receiving.
RSS Alerts & Blog Alerts
Your competitors could be talking about YOU… Or perhaps you want to hear what OTHERS are saying about your competitors and their products. Maybe you’ll over hear the one feature everyone wishes they would fix, giving YOU the opportunity to come up with something the market truly thirsts for.
To track everything said in blogs and RSS around the web, simply visit Bloglines and in the top right, do a search for whatever you like. Perhaps enterprise.com (the domain of a competitor) or their product, etc…
Then, find the RSS icon as shown below… (See? I Put a big arrow to it for you!)
Then, go and visit feedmyinbox.com (bet they don’t even know it’s a great competitive intelligence tool!) paste the URL and your email address in there and recieve updates any time something happens on the web via RSS or Blogs! Pretty kewl, eh?
Competition Updates On The Go
Using Xfruits , you can even send RSS via voice, sms, text message to your cell phone, email or anything else! RSS feeds now encompass search results, blog updates, competitor website changes (sitemap.xml?) and tons of other things. I bet there’s ways of monitoring the competition with these tools even I haven’t imagined that you now have at your fingertips!
Do me a favor
If you found something AMAZINGLY juicy, something useful something you needed here. Please Digg, facebook, stumble upon something it!
Please tweet it, or something. Because we sure could use the links as we’re just building up the site and getting it going.
I’ve made convenient social buttons at the bottom of the post that should make it only ONE click to "digg" etc.
Your seeing this all over the web right now as it’s becoming a hot story, because it’s interesting how many eyeballs and ears apple’s already grabbed somehow.
They’ve got our cell phones (millions of iPhones) they’ve got a percentage of the computers (every designer doing web-dev) and they’re gaming for our web browser (Safari now available for Windows, Linux & Mac!).
I talked to 3-4 different friends yesterday about conversion tracking. I asked them if they were running conversion tracking, or even just Google Analytics and was met with some interesting questions.
If I asked 3-4 people I consider internet marketing experts ( and I don’t use that lightly ), what are the chances your competitors are doing it? Not very likely!!!
So, my last blog post explained how to track conversions from Refferers and from search keywords. Why is that so very insanely powerful?
If you could give me $1.00 and I gave you $5.00 back, how many times would you do it?!?
Fact is, check your IQ level if you said anything lower than INFINITY! Knowing exactly what causes a conversion from any source is insanely powerful.
If you knew that every time you posted on a certain website, you got a 5% conversion rate, how often would you?
If you knew a certain keyword phrase that converted at 11% how much money would you sink into Google Adwords?
Enough said.
It’s funny, the chances that your competitors have goal tracking setup, know how to use custom reporting and are gunning for the top producing keywords is probably pretty slim.
Reports look like this:
You can track leads, chats, sales and know exactly which campaigns are working and which aren’t. See my last post if you want granular detail on how to set it up.
In terms of competitive intelligence, one thing that entrepreneurs
world wide can appreciate and love is flexibility.
That’s one thing large companies don’t have and small startups and age old
smaller companies *DO* have. The ability to make a decision or re-work
an entire idea in a weekend instead of a year long effort.
GM was too BIG for their britches
The end of large companies? No, not at all.
See, it’s a cycle that’s been happening for a long time. Companies start
small, grow too big and become top heavy & unmanagable, restructure
and either die, or come out as a series of smaller companies serving
different interests.
I’ve been following the GM story for a long time. I grew up in a GM Family.
No, none of us worked for GM but Dad & some of his friends drove GM
vehicles and we found them easy to work on, find parts for and were
fairly economical at the time.
The immediate predictions and effects of
the bankruptcy…
Instant unemployment jump…
We’ve all been expecting it, but it’s inevitable. We’re going to see more unemployed due to the restructuring and changes at GM.
Long term less production of parts & vehicles…
Parts may be come harder to find, jobs in the parts industries will also be effected. Long term bonus for the non-oem manufacturers as they can start producing what the factories can’t keep up with in demand for parts…
The smaller more versatile company
GM may find itself in a position to re-think some of their earlier concepts of marketing & services. Their OnStar service was a strong benefit to their cars over the other manufacturers, perhaps this along with other benefits will give the smaller GM more weight.
What can we learn from this?
First off, GM could have survived if their "weight loss" program were more vigorus in the begining. Cut 50% of your dealerships this year? Sheah right! They were TOO big to execute a move like that, but quick drastic moves would have save d them. Not saved all the jobs, or all the parts manufacturing, but definitely saved the company & brand they spent 100 years developing!
Secondly… SIZE of company.. When a company gets too big, the smartest thing to do RIGHT away is to start branching the company into smaller pieces & chunks. Those departments form their own companies.
If you don’t do this, the entire entity becomes too hard to make swift moves with. Truth is a company should always we able to make bold decisions in tough times.
A small company lays off 1/2 it’s staff every couple summers and no one find’s it that surprising or crazy, a large company does that and it’s going for broke.
A small view perhaps, but when your doing competitive intelligence against other companies, watch the BIG companies competing against you, start thinking about what you can do against a slow moving dinosaur. Rock & Roll.
I thought i’d write about this for several reasons. First off,
when examining your competition with a tool like linkdiagnosis
or similar, it’s important to realize what links can push insane
value, which ones are mediocre and which ones are completely
flat and worthless.
Step back, why would you examine your competitors links thru
linkdiagnosis.com or similar? Links are 50% or more of the
Google & Yahoo ranking algorithms and help the engines decide
how popular your website is. It’s thru duplicating your
competitors links that you start to borrow some of the success
they already have with their sites.
Qualities of a good SEO Link
What site is the link on?
The website the link is posted on should be relavent to your
niche in some way. Maybe they supply materials, they’re also
in your industry or something.
It’s also nice to get some .Gov & .Edu links and even some
.ORG links (the domain of the linking site) pointing to yours.
(i’ll be describing that soon in the new book "linkbuilding 2009)
Other very important factors to consider are the age of the site
you got the link from, and the amount of popularity it holds.
Obviously a more popular and older site is more valuable than
a younger less popular site.
Where is the link?
A link from CNN.com isn’t good enough if they link to you
somewhere far in the nether regions where no one will see it.
But it’s good for rankings, right? Not neccesarily. The better
links are found in content and editorial links found dead
center of the website where the articles themselves reside.
The second best are those in the navigational menus on the
top and right hand side. The ones at the bottom carry less
weight. It makes sense, I mean if i shove a link down there
I bet 90% of the time it’s to forget about it or I was obligated
to put it there somehow, it’s not as important as the centre
stage stuff.
The anatomy of the link itself
The next thing to consider is the text of the link itself and how
it looks. A link that goes to your website with a keyword like furnace installation is much better than one that just goes
straight to your name.. BUT.. it’s better to have variety and
some http://www.mywebsite.com links and some "My Keyword "
links to even things out.
Some places you submit to will let you control the text on
the link. Directories let you choose a title that often becomes
the blue clickable text, some forums & online sites actually
let you use an HTML description which allows you to create:
It’s my experience that only some types of links are penalized
for being built too fast, and some may argue that with me but
I suppose i could easily pull tons of case study examples to
show otherwise.
An example… If you send out a press release, can you control
That all of the sudden 200 people copy that release and
re-distribute it all over the web with your link in it? Obviously
not! However, 50 directory submissions in one day? Yeah, that’s
obviously not realistic.
Some obvious natural link builders:
* Social bookmarks
* Site shares (digg, stumbleupon)
* Press releases
* Bloggers
Some obviously submitted by you links:
* Blog Comments
* Article submissions
* Directory Submissions
* Forum signups
Ever feel like your website optimization should have a dash board just like your car? Letting you know if your going the right speed, still have lots of gas, or if the temperature is ok?
I like to think of SiteYogi that way. This ingenious tool tells you a TON of things about your OFF Page optimization in one screen.
It’s like an entire “Off page optimization analytics” or “SEO analysis website”.
Perhaps that’s a bit much, but seriously… One page where all off page metrics are right there!
Things like:
* Pagerank
* technorati
* Alexa
* Dmoz
* Backlinks in the top 10 search engines
* Keywords, Title tags, etc..
* The indexed pages on the various search engines
* Country, Author etc..
* Social bookmarking submissions
* Validations
* Syndications
Sheah, check it out, put it on your bookmarks. I recommend getting something like primoPDF or similar and doing a file -> print -> Save as PDF of this every month and watching where things go.
Or even so… Using it as a way to spy on your competitiors! And STOMP the competition.
I was watching my Google analytics the other day when I noticed a very strange
referring website address. It was called "HideMyAss.com" and, of course I went
and checked it out!
I’ve been familiar with Ip address cloaking so the next website you visit can’t see
Where you came from or who you are before, but the brand name is quite hilarious!
So, if you want to spy on YOUR Competition, without getting caught, check this tool
out, it’s interesting anyway. I’ve always used software like the free extension browser
tool called "RefControl" For Firefox. It’s very customizable but you do have to have some
Internet/computer programming knowledge to understand it’s capabilities.
This resource is nothing short of amazing. Beyond being able to extract
the ad groups and keywords of your competitors or even other affiliates or
companies that are already profitable…There’s something even cooler here.
Just from a glance, we can all see who’s advertising on a given market or
keyword… But I did a quick scan on "car rental" with their free tool on the
site and found that I could see how many keywords each business had in
their campaigns!!!
Now, I have a team 7 staff dedicated to helping my clients succeed online.
The standard research done by our staff is never less than 1000 keywords
on average. If I see tiny campaigns or accounts running, I *know* they aren’t
capturing the entire market space.
But that’s just the begining. Competitve Intel at it’s best, check out Keyword Spy for yourself, it’s quite impressive.
Daniel Deyette
SEM/SEO & Copywriting Expert.
Social/Viral Media consultant AnswersWanted Inc
People are typing in longer searches than ever before, according to Hitwise,
a noted competition intelligence provider.
This means quite a few things though, really. It means that Google’s edge on understanding what people
want could be less effective than it was in the past. It could also mean that people are getting better at knowing exactly what they want.
Regardless, it sure points to tightening up landing pages and adding more content to the ole’ website!
Found a cool tool this week while reading a magazine I picked up at the grocery store. This tool lets you get email updates whenever a site is updated. Now, they probably assume you’ll use their tool for keeping up on news, or even finding out when your favorite blog has a new post. I see this as excellent spy gear!
Before I go and reveal every juicy strategy to discovering the tools necessary to dig into every element of a competitor’s online marketing campaign, let me go over the elements we’re looking for. I’ll show you with the tools I’m about to reveal, you can see EVERY element of a competitor’s online marketing campaign.
