Critical Research Results of Competitive Intelligence Basics

There are many Competitive Intelligence Methods Jeff West and myself use when trying to decide which vertical or verticals we want to tap. And before we do, we like to determine what we're up against. Here are a few handy tips we employ almost every day. Before we compete in any vertical, we want to take a view at 2-3 prosperous Companies in that market and drill down and determine what we can find on them.

Competitor Intelligence Tip #1 - Find Out How Huge a Website Is

When we want to determine how many pages a website has, we type the following command into google. For observance purposes lets hypothecate we're checking out IM Review Kings. So I'd input the site:www dot imreviewkings dot com command into Google.

You'll end up seeing something equivalent to this:

Results 1 - 10 of about 763 from www dot imreviewkings dot com. (0.13 seconds)

In this scenario it shows us as having 763 active pages listed in the SERP's, or Search Engine Results Pages.

Find Out What Google Page Rank a Website Has

Another Competitive Intelligence tactic is to download the free google PageRank Display Software. Google issues PR or PageRank, They issue Companies a Page Rank of anywhere from 0-9 depending on many different variables, such as age, how many back links a site has, how applicable and on-topic your website content is, etc.. Essentially Page Rank is a substance of how profound a webpage is to google.

A site with a PR3 is okay, a PR4 is pretty darn good and a PR5 is considerable. Our goal is to get our top 6 Companies we own all a PR5 in about 3 years or so. It takes a ton of work and requires some specialized acumen to do this, but it's doable. Another cool component regarding the Google PageRank Toolbar is you'll determine a small little black arrow that's pointing downward directly to the right of the image icon. If you roll your mouse over and click this, you'll determine a small drop-down menu. One of the options I equivalent to to employ is the Cached Snapshot of Page Icon which will let me know if this webpage was cached, and if it was, it will tell me the last time this exact page was cached.

Sometimes I'll employ this component because I'll want to take one of my articles on my site and submit them to other article repositories for more back links. But I don't want to submit any articles I use my own money for until google discovers them on my webpage first. By using this component I don't have to try to guess when I should submit these articles because this component will tell me.

Competitor Intelligence Tip #2 - Find Out How Many Back links a Website Has

Augment your Competitive Intelligence by visiting Market Leap to find how many Back links any Website has and use a tool called their Link Popularity Checker. It's much simpler to build back links using Yahoo than it is google. Yahoo counts inner links pointing to each other as well as multiple inbound links from the same Website or IP Address. The google search engine will only give you credit for one link per unique website linking to you and Google is much more fickle on how they arbitrate these links for incidental admission into their search results. Try typing in 5-10 sites you've been wondering about for a little while to get the gist of it.

Competitor Intelligence Tip #3 - Find Out How Much Traffic A Website Gets

All you have to do to figure out how much Website Traffic a Website receives each month is to visit Compete Dot Com and enter a few differing Sites and analzye the varied traffic and metrics from each of these websites you type in. You'll quickly discover the real deal and know more verbatim what you are up against which will make your marketing efforts a whole lot easier.

Competitor Intelligence Tip #4 - View Alexa Traffic and Website Rankings

Millions of folks download the Valuable Alexa Toolbar, and because they do this, you can now simply find where any Website ranks with reasonably good precision. They rank millions of Companies and assign them any number, the lower the figure the higher ranked the site is on Alexa. This is also super Competitive Intelligence.

Competitor Intelligence Tip #5 - Find Out How Old A Website Is

This is very easy to find. There are a ton of places, mostly Domain Registration Websites that offer this no-cost service but the one that we employ is located at Network Solutions. Look toward the bottom of the page in the Resources Section for a WHOIS Search link and roll your mouse over and click that. Simply type in the website linking to you, and you'll be able to find when it was first registered. This definitely have some influence on Competitors because a relatively large part of Googles Quality score has to do with how many years a Website has been on the Internet.

Competitor Intelligence Tip #6 - Why Brian Garvin and Jeff West Use SEO Elite

The other tool we use to spy on our competitors is a software tool called SEO Elite by Brad Callen. To be honest, they offer 8 differing features but we only use two on a consistent basis, which more than pays for the tool. Thankfully there aren't any recurring fees attached with this software.

We use the Analyze Backlinks component as well as the Find Out Where Your Website is Ranked for a Particular Keyword component. All you do is compete in the keyword and the URL and which Companies you want to find, and lastly select the Search Engines you want it to search for, and SEO Elite will search the first 1,000 varied traffic and metrics in the SERP's and let you know where you rank on that keyword. This is very serious Competitive Intelligence data that will allow us to compete on any keyword we want.

There are other different types of software and tools out there to Analyze Competitors, but these are all we need and use on a daily basis, or every day we're on the job.

Make Internet Marketing Review Kings Brian "The Ghost" Garvin & Jeffrey West show you more with relation to Competitive Intelligence now. You can always visit our website as we have a ton of wherewithal to help you find what you need, with no obligation.