evil
You may choose to pay for your competitive research if you are among the lucky few who still have money in this economy. Or you can set aside a couple of hours of your time and follow my advice on how to keep up with the Joneses in the online world. And everything you need is an Internet connection and a Mozilla FireFox browser.
Now what? Get a couple of plug-ins to transform your FireFox browser into a competitive data digger. I recommend these three:
Step one may seem basic yet it is very important: visit your competitor’s website, browse and click around. If you are not sure which pages are more important, I recommend looking at the news and press releases section (that way you’ll get some insight into how their business has been going and what kind of public image they’ve been trying to build) and the jobs section (you’ll know if they are hiring, what they are looking for and which skills they see as vital in a candidate – great info to get a good understanding of where things are at with them). I also like to visit the management team page because it provides you names of all key executives. Write them down and look these people up on Linked In, Xing, Naymz, and the likes. Then look them up on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Lastly, search for your competitor’s key executives on Google News and Technorati.
If your competitor mails a catalog or a printed newsletter, try to find who thes list manager is and pull the data card from the manager’s site to get a rough sense of your competitor’s size, annual growth and customer profile.
Never skip the company blog even though it may be tempting to do so. Focus on the most recent posts but do not completely ignore old ones – sometimes blogs will provide you with a road map on your comeptitor’s strenghts and weaknesses, business objectives, and marketing strategy.
Now, let’s do the fun part. Start by looking at the source code of the competitor’s home page. To do so, either right click on the page -> view page source or Ctr+U (a shortcut for Mozilla browser). Look for comments in the code, meta data (page title, meta keywords, page description). Also pay attention to the javascript code on the page – it would typically be located in the footer – to find out if they use any web analytics or special tracking. Check their robots.txt to see which pages they prefer to keep out of the index by typing in www.competitorswebsitename.com/robots.txt (for fun, check out www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt – out of all people, their robots.txt is quite a read!)
Now, let’s see how they look in terms of SEO. Go to www.websitegrader.com and run their check to find weak spots on your competitor’s website. Compare them against your website to get even more perspective on where you can outsmart them.
Do you spend much time on social network? You have an official excuse to do it today: get social to find out if your comeptitor’s brand name is all over Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Youtube, Delicious, Digg, StumbelUpon, Twitter and the many others out there. You’ll get everything from inside scoop on employee satisfaction and retention to looking at pictures from an office baby shower and a Christmas party.
If your competitor is a public company, spend some time on Yahoo Finance and Google Finance to look at the annual reports and read comments on their financials.
If they are a private company, visit Hoovers to see if you’ll be lucky enough to find associated entities and ventures.
Ready to go more technical? Then it’s time to go to www.whois.com to find contacts for the domain name, learn where the domain is registered and for how long. There are some other cool tools that show your competitor’s server (Domain Tools) to get some idea about the technical strategy of your competitor and their IP addresses (in case you want to exclude them from seeing your pay-per-click ads and to use later in your research).
Enable SEO fro Firefox and search for your competitor’s brand name and URL on Google to look at backlinks and ranks. The Quirks will also give you a good idea about indexed pages and inbound link structure. It is not a bad idea to type in your competitor’s IP address to see if some juicy forum entries or server logs come up. Also run their IP through SEO Logs to reveal if there are any affiliated companies or projects not generally known to be linked to your competitor.
If you think that whitehat strategy is too boring, you may move to the grey side by looking if your competitor has any open ports on their server. This can be done through Nmap and T1 Shopper.
Moving from white-hat research toward gray, scan your competitor’s IP address to see what ports are open. If you don’t have access to Nmap (http://insecure.org/nmap), there’s a limited, Web-based, port-scanning tool at T1 Shopper (t1shopper.com/tools/port-scanner).
Now, the highlight of your evening is about to begin: run your own company through the same process. The results may confirm each and every single concern you had but will also help you think about strategic differentiators against your competitor that you can monetize on.
Lastly, go to Compete and run your website next to your competitor’s. You’ll see who is getting more traffic, look at the recent traffic trends, and get some idea about where you need to improve. Also look at Google Search Insights and compare brand names to see what’s been happening to the user interest lately.
That should be more than enough for initial research but if you found this useful check back soon for more advanced tips on competitive research. I may even go more into black hat strategies to pinpoint your competitor’s weakest spots.
