One of the best ways in any business to maintain a competitive advantage is to keep a close eye on the competition. The secret is not to follow, but to predict the direction that they might take, before it actually happens. There are a number of ways you can keep an eye on the competition online.
The SERPS
Search engines not only provide us with fantastic results, but can be tailored so you can see what your competitors websites are doing, and whether they are launching new products, linking up with new suppliers, or putting new staff in place. Most if not of these things can be monitored. Google Alerts for example can show you when a company gets a mention anywhere on the web.
Monitoring for new pages being added or changed.
Lets for the purposes of this post, use my domain (webdistortion.com). If I wanted to know when a new blog post had been made – then I can simply subscribe to the RSS feed. If however a new page gets added on the main site – how could I monitor that? Well using Google Alerts in this case isn’t really the best solution (although I use it vigorously for other things) – by the time Google picks up on the page, it may have been online for several days / months – depending on how frequently Google indexes. WatchthatPage is a site for monitoring and analyzing competitors for changes to pages.
Monitoring Blogosphere
Our own free monitoring tool, does a good job of looking at the blogosphere, and when a company name gets mentioned on any of the major rss distributors, the tool picks it up. You can even subscribe to a feed directly from it in Google Reader to pick new data up.
