The best session I attended this week at Pubcon was Competitive Intelligence: Know Thy Competitor Well. It had a great lineup of speakers and the place was packed full of attendees. In case you missed the panel and wanted to learn a bit more about how to monitor your competitors, I’ve got a recap handy for your reading (and monitoring) pleasure.

Matt Siltala

If you’re new to competitive monitoring and don’t know where to start, here are some tips:

• Hubs. Find and identify the easy ones. Look for places to find content ideas, links, sites that can help with keyword research and sites linking to more than one competitor.
• Press. How is your competition using press? This can help generate ideas by keeping up with trending opportunities, linking opportunities, etc.
• Review sites. Where are your competitors getting talked about? Who’s writing about them? How are these reviews getting done?
• Forums. Which forums are your competitors hanging out in, and how are they participating?
• Local search. How does your competition stack up on local search? Do they have any sort of local presence?
• Directories. Find the sites/directories that are linking to more than one competitor and see if you can get added to them.
• Anchor text. Find and identify everything there is to know about how the competition ranks.
• Unique domains linking in. Analyze how many unique domains are linking to your competitor to get a better idea of the work that’s ahead of you to get equivalent rankings.
• Strong content. Keep an eye on your competitors’ strongest pages.

Michael Gray

Michael shared a bunch of sites that he uses for competitive monitoring:

• Quarkbase — find out everything about a website, such as the most recent and popular pages people have submitted from this site to social media sites.
• Topsy
• Viralconversations.com
• Bit.ly — how many people have clicked on a particular link
• Tweetmeme

Use more than one site when monitoring, because each site will pull up slightly different information, and it’s important to have a comprehensive and varied view. Pay attention to who is talking about your competitors and note any patterns you find.

Plan a competitive monitoring course of action:

• Research how, where, and when your competition is engaging in social media
• Look for points with high levels of engagement or other success metrics
• Dissect their network, looking for their inner circle
• Join their network or build your own

Michael Streko

The other Michael on this panel recommended using incompetence to your advantage. Find out who’s linking to your competitors and point out any misspellings, outdated information, etc that you come across to see if they’d rather link to you instead. According to Streko, if it’s on the web, it’s fair game. Snoop snoop snoop. What they hide from the engines is your advantage.
Know your competitors’ presence:

• Monitor their social activity
• Use alerts to your advantage
• Use organic and paid keyword tracking
• Use SEM Rush

Use tools to compete. Watch their Alexa ranking, know their Compete score and use Quantcast data if it’s available. Set up similar sites if you can, then open up the lines of communication and request a link exchange. Also consider advertising on their site, since Adwords should give you a semi-accurate reading of their traffic.

Andy Beal

Andy went through a great list of different things to track. For your competition, track the company name, its CEO, its products and locations, etc. Keep an eye out for new products and features, media placements, sympathetic bloggers, etc.
For rants, track your company’s brand plus words like “sucks,” “defective,” “crap,” “poor,” “expensive,” etc. Try to poach their unhappy clients and customers, promote your alternative product, or use their feedback to improve your products.

Also track your competitors’ employees. Keep an eye on their blogs, social profiles, photos, videos and social presence on the web. “Loose lips sink brands,” as Andy put it. You can gather damaging evidence, glean new information about upcoming products or company news, or find potential hires. Also scour your competition’s job listings to find out information about new locations opening up, job turnover, expansion, products in development, etc.

You can also use Google to track a lot of competitor activity:

• Google.com/alerts via email or RSS
• Google Sidewiki
• Local listings

And you should be paying attention to Facebook. Read/monitor your competition’s fan pages and identify who their fans are. Search posts on Facebook and mentions to see who’s talking about them and in what way.

Track your competitors’ URLs too. Andy shared some good resources you can use:

• – Domaintools.com/registrant-alert will send you an alert any time a certain email address is used to register a domain name
• Domaintools.com/mark-alert will give you trademark alerts (whenever a competitor is registering a trademark)
• Oodle.com/job will alert you to job postings (the company name, location, skills/position)

Here are some advanced competitive monitoring tools. They vary in price but are worth checking out.

• Socialmention.com
• Trackur.com
• Radian6.com
• Visibletechnologies.com

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