7 Ways of Using Analytics to Understand Your Competition

The more you can understand your competition, the better business you’re going to have. You can learn so much from them - especially if they’ve been around longer than you have. If you know for a fact the competition is profitable and that they are good at what they do, it’s even more important to learn all you can from them. You can do that by using analytics.

• Google Alerts – This is an excellent, free service. Sign in and choose keywords, names, and more to search for. Then, set up how often you want to receive the alerts in your email inbox. You can scan each email to find information about your competition that you can use in your own business.
• Social Mention – Use this cloud-based search engine to search websites, blogs and more for mentions about your competition. Then you can go take a look at what they’re doing. Identify the gaps in their offerings and you can outshine your competition in no time.
• Website Grader – While it does ask for your website and not your competition’s (and your email address), you can still use it to check the health of someone else’s website. The information you will receive is page size, page speed, redirects and more, including how many requests for the site have been made. It also tells you how they’re doing on SEO and more.
• Link-Assistant.com – Using this downloadable software you can study keywords of your competitor’s site so that you will know what keywords they’re using. You can then use them on your own website to nab their traffic.
• SocialAdNinja – You can use this software to copy and make your competitor’s ads your own. Of course, you don’t copy them exactly, as you are selling your own products, but this will help you duplicate the most successful ads online.
• KeywordSpy – This software is an amazing way to profit from your competition’s hard work and research. You can find out what keywords they’re using, what they’re spending for AdWords, their ROI estimate, and much more.
• Open Site Explorer by MOZ – You can get a lot of information about your competition from this cloud-based option. You can get information about the links that come into the site and the anchor text used, and you can even compare five sites. What’s more, it’s free when you sign up.

Using these tools to discover important data to analyze about your competition is a great way to grow your business and please your audience. By keeping an eye on your competition you can learn about what your audience really wants and what they really respond to.

Until next time,
Iolande V. Argent
CEO|Coach|Author
Successful Business Builders
Successful Business Management eCourse

---