Q: Is it possible to spy on a competitor online and see where they are focusing their marketing efforts?
A: Yes, to an extent. The recent advances in technology and the totally awesome free tools (built by masterminds) allow you to gain a very useful insight as to what your competitors are doing online. While I will not divulge all of the secrets in our toolbox (we are available for hire at affordable prices), I will give a few away. We have spent a lot of time over the years to hone in on our techniques, only to find out that some people think it’s impossible, while others believe it’s relativity easy.
Grab a pen and paper. Ready?
There are many tools and two of my favorites (which are free) are WMTools.com and WMTips.com. The data they provide will gather enough necessary information to show the technology and marketing behind a competitors site:
- Backlinks in Google and Yahoo!
- # of pages indexed in major search engines
- Backlinks in Google blogsearch
- Backlinks on Digg and Delicious
- Indexed images on Google image search
- Current top rankings
- History of the site with historical data and cache versions
- Site load speed
- Robots.txt information
Tons of great information at your fingertips. Can you image the knowledge that you will gain by looking at this data?
The post True or False Friday – Spying on a Competitor appeared first on TM Blog.