What is competitive intelligence?

Competitive Intelligence is the process by which business enterprises gather and analyze information on their external competitive environment. There are several other definitions, all focusing on the same principle. A second definition (from the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals) is "Competitive intelligence is a systematic and ethical program for gathering, analyzing, and managing Information about the external Business environment that can affect a company's plans, decisions, and operations. - As shown in Wikipedia 

What does this mean for you?

Would knowing everything your competitor is doing for their online marketing help you to better market your own site? Of course it would!
Competitive intelligence is having something in place to monitor what your competitors are doing and then analyzing and using this information to manage your own companies plans.

Do you know who your competitors are?

Many businesses dont know who their competitors are, this makes getting through the rat race a little bit harder. If you know who your bigger competitors are, you will be able to see what they are doing different from you. You can then work on being better. For most businesses to succeed they just need to have that small edge over their competitor, something that makes them different from everyone else. This is impossible if you do not know who you need to be different from.

Find out who your competitors are!

There are a few different ways in which you can find out who your online competitors are. You might want to start in the search engines.
As an example, lets say you are selling handmade jewelry. What you could do is go to a search engine like Google or Yahoo! and put in the search field "handmade jewelry", you have just created a huge list of your competitors.
BUT this way can have drawbacks, some of the search results may not be for exactly what you are doing. This list of competitors is to broad and can not really be considered a major competitor. What you need to do then is focus your search, try changing the keyword to "handmade rings" or something that more relates to what you are doing.
There are more ways, to find out some of these please contact us.

Time to find out about your competitor.

There are a few different tools and ideas to find out about what your competitor is doing for their online marketing. One of the best ways is to use a tool that will help you gather intelligence about them. We recommend the one called Competitive Intelligence by Trellian.

Why this tool? It is very easy to use and understand, the pricing is such that a small one person business can use it to their advantage. You can create a full executive report to use for yourself or to pass on to clients.

The information that this collects is:
- the sites and search engines that send traffic to your competitor and the volume of traffic that each site and page is sending through.
- the organic keywords being used to find your competitor, which search engines and again the volume of traffic for each keyword.
- the paid keywords being bid on the ppc search engines, the URL attached to it, the ranking of it and again the volume traffic.
- the ranking of their keywords, both paid and organic in the search engines...
plus much more...

Trellian Competitive Intelligence

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