Small Business Trends

11 Competitive Intelligence Tools for SMBs

Small Business TrendsNovember 18, 2009By Lisa Barone

intelligence toolsIt’s not stalking. It’s research. It’s you doing research on your competitors to help you stay up-to-date on what they’re doing so you know which direction you should go. It’s not stalking and everyone’s doing it.

Here’s a list of 11 tools that can help you track your competitors movements on the Web and give you actionable information that you can use. It doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you a savvy site owner.  We’ll start off gentle.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts are great little inventions because they allow you track virtually anything and have it delivered either to your email or RSS. What kinds of stuff should you be tracking? The name of our competitor’s company, their employee names, their CEO, product names, locations, mentions of new features, etc. What kinds of media are you looking for? Their blogs, social profiles, photos, videos, Flickr accounts, Facebook pages, etc. Why? The more you know, the better off you are to make smart decisions.

Twitter

Follow your competitors on Twitter. Follow their employees. Follow the people that engage most often with your competitors. Follow the people your competitors are following. Use Private Twitter Lists to do it all discretely. Private Lists are a goldmine for stalking. I mean, researching.

Twitter Search

Create RSS feeds or Save Twitter Searches to track important keywords, competitors’ Twitter user names, and product names (yours and theirs).  You can also use the Advanced Geo search to key in a certain radius from your competitor’s storefront.

Bit.ly

If you’re using Twitter, you’re probably already familiar with bit.ly. It’s one of the many URL shortening services out there. What’s different about bit.ly is that it gives you really great link stat information. It will tell you how many people clicked on your link, how many times it was retweeted, how many people clicked on the retweeted link, what times of day people retweeted it, who was doing the actual retweeting, etc. It’s a really great way to find and identify your network online so you can leverage them in the future.

Yahoo Site Explorer

Knowing that links are an essential part of getting your site to rank, Yahoo Site Explorer can show you WHO is linking to your competitors, as well as who’s linking to you. Where are competitors getting their links from? How can you get links from similar sources? What holes do they have in their link profile that you can capitalize on? This tool will tell you.

SEO for Firefox

This is great FF plugin offered by SEOBook’s Aaron Wall that gives site owners a robust look at whatever site they’re looking at. It tells you a site’s PageRank, age, number of links at a certain domain/page, how its done in social media, how many people are subscribed to its blog, if it’s listed in DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory, etc. Because it offers such great information about links, many people like to use it evaluate competitor’s content pieces.

Quarkbase

Once you put your URL in it will tell you the most recent and the most popular pages from a certain site that have been submitted. You can see where they’ve been submitted, how many votes they received, how many subscribers they have, etc. You can also search by “submitted on” or “submitted by” to see where your competitors are having their content submitted and who’s doing the submitting.

SocialMention

This is a pretty neat tool. Enter in a search term (competitor’s name, product name, keyword, etc) and SocialMention will track down what people are saying about that term across different blogs and social outlets. It will even attempt to track sentiment analysis to tell you if the mentions are positive, negative or neutral (this can get a bit wonky). It will tell you how many times a keyword was talked about, the time frame, and let you subscribe to an RSS feed for that term or export the information as a CSV. It’s one of my personal favorite tools to play with.

Compete

Compete will give you a complete profile of any site on the Web. You give them the domain and give you an approximation of their unique visitors and the keywords that are bringing people to their site. You can also compare several different sites up against each other. There’s a paid option which will give you even more analytical type information, as well.

copernic.com

Copernic offers a great tracker tool that will look for new content on your competitors’ Web pages and then email you a highlighted version so you know what they changed. If they put up a page about a new product they’ll soon be carrying, you’ll know. If they start altering text to rank for different keywords, you’ll know. If they update their employee page to create new positions, you’ll know. It’s a $49.95 investment but, I think it’s worth it.

Domaintools.com

DomainTools will collect a bunch of information about a Web site and report back. You can find out if your competitors are listed in the Yahoo directory, get registration details, what other sites are on the same IP (may be sites that company also owns), etc. You can also set up Registration Alerts to inform you each time your competitor creates a new domain name or a Mark Alert to tell you if they’ve used a particular keyword.

There you have it. A list of some of my favorite spy tools. You still trust me, right?

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169 Responses to “11 Competitive Intelligence Tools for SMBs”

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  1. Todd Allison says:
    November 18, 2009 at 10:42 am

    Nice list, the only one I don’t agree with is Compete. Compete as a competitive intelligence tool is really only valuable for very large advertisers.

    From the large sites I have analytics access to it is not accurate at all. According to Avinash Kaushik those tools are valuable for sites with 1mm+ visits a month – not many SMBs fit into that category.

  2. Robert Brady says:
    November 18, 2009 at 11:00 am

    You could easily make a longer list since there are so many tools out there, but for most SMBs the real question is how to find the time to use these tools. Many of them are time-savers in general, but what would be your recommended process if you only had 15 minutes/day to spend on this?

  3. Tarquin Wyeth says:
    November 19, 2009 at 3:37 am

    Very useful tools. Thanks for sharing.

  4. Heather Villa says:
    November 19, 2009 at 4:52 am

    Good point Robert. I do feel it’s important to keep up on what your competitors are doing, but how many of us small business owners have time to actually do it? My solution – delegation. I have found that I can have my virtual assistant do tasks, such as this, for me while I continue to work on growing my business. Per hour it cost me less to pay my assistant than for me to do it myself when my time can be spent more productively.

  5. Martin Lindeskog says:
    November 19, 2009 at 6:09 am

    Lisa: I still trust your expertise! ;) Thanks for the list. I have to explore several of these new tools. I recognized some of them and I have used e.g. Google Alert, Twitter search, bit.ly and domain tools. Here in Sweden you could find a couple of business intelligence tools like Agent25 and Aitellu. If you want to neat blog tool, check out Twingly.

  6. Joel Libava says:
    November 19, 2009 at 7:41 am

    Lisa,

    Thank you.

    Thank you!

    Great list-great reminder to keep your eyes wide open.

    The Franchise King
    Joel Libava

  7. Umberto Milletti says:
    November 19, 2009 at 10:22 am

    Sorry for the self-promotion, but readying this I couldn’t resist…

    Robert’s point is key – efficiency, given limited time.
    That’s why we built SalesView – which brings together alerts, twitter, compete.com, 20,000 news source, Reuters, S&P, Jigsaw, Netprospex… all in one place, and integrated into your CRM of choice.
    And most importantly the technology tracks your competitors, prospects, customers for you, analyzing and notifying you of compelling information.
    Free and premium versions, individual & team.

  8. Jennifer Rai says:
    November 19, 2009 at 10:52 am

    Great list! We are lucky that in today’s market there are such great marketing tools for free at our disposal!

  9. Clayton Shumway says:
    November 19, 2009 at 1:31 pm

    Great list! I didn’t know some of these existed. It will be interesting to see how bit.ly can track my shortened URLs. Thanks for the post.

  10. Build Your Business By Promoting Competitors | Small Business Trends says:
    November 26, 2009 at 4:02 pm

    [...] week I highlighted some of the best competitive intelligence tools available for small business owners. In truth, the best competitive intelligence tool of them all [...]

  11. Build Your Business By Promoting Competitors « Secure Networks says:
    November 28, 2009 at 4:58 pm

    [...] week I highlighted some of the best competitive intelligence tools available for small business owners. In truth, the best competitive intelligence tool of them all [...]

  12. 11 Competitive Intelligence Tools for SMBs ● Portál CI - Competitive Intelligence aneb Konkurenční zpravodajství says:
    November 29, 2009 at 3:38 am

    [...] BARONE, Lisa. 11 Competitive Intelligence Tools for SMBs. Small Business Trends [online]. November 18, 2009 [cit. 2009–11–29]. Dostupné z: http://smallbiztrends.com/…or-smbs.html [...]

  13. Top 10 startup articles I read last week « Startup Musings says:
    November 30, 2009 at 7:40 am

    [...] 11 competitive intelligence tools for small businesses [...]

  14. November ‘09: Best Search/Marketing Posts « Site Seo Doctor Blog says:
    December 1, 2009 at 6:20 am

    [...] Lisa Barone/SmallBizTrends: 11 Competitive Intelligence Tools for SMBs [...]

  15. Nick Stamoulis says:
    December 2, 2009 at 8:32 am

    The Google alerts are really great for keeping up with things going on in any industry. It can get really time consuming hunting around for information and setting up alerts really cuts down on time.

  16. November ‘09: Best Search/Marketing Posts says:
    February 1, 2010 at 2:15 pm

    [...] Lisa Barone/SmallBizTrends: 11 Competitive Intelligence Tools for SMBs [...]

  17. Mohan Arun L (@marun2 on Twitter) says:
    February 3, 2010 at 12:06 am

    You can also add samepoint.com to this list. It lets you monitor social media sites and Q&A sites like Yahoo answers, askville etc. for your brand keywords or other keywords of interest.

  18. kerrostalo kyttääjä says:
    December 2, 2009 at 4:23 am

    Vartiossanukkumisen ja vihollisen kanssa veljeilyn mitali täytynee luovutaa Astrid Thorsille

    This comment was originally posted on Lehti

  19. Mitä tapahtuikaan mediamaksumerkille says:
    December 2, 2009 at 8:07 am

    Tässä taas oiva esimerkki vasemmistolaisten toimittajien salajuonesta, millä syrjitään ihmisiä, joiden isät eivät karanneet minnekään.

    This comment was originally posted on Lehti

  20. Takatuuppari says:
    December 2, 2009 at 8:41 am

    Ehdotan myös mitalia kaikille sotilaspalvelijoille, jotka sodan aikana tuuppasivat Mannerheimia matkalaukkuun.

    This comment was originally posted on Lehti

  21. Satunnainen raportoija says:
    December 2, 2009 at 9:46 am

    Iltapäivä- ja naistenlehdet ovat ehdottaneet presidentin itsenäisyyspäivän vastaanotolle eniten keskustelua herättävän iltapuvun valinneelle tyrkkyjulkkikselle Itsenäisen Suomen rohkeimman puketujan ansiomerkkiä, koska se kiteyttäisi kaiken sen mistä itsenäisyydessä todella on kyse.

    Koska palkinnon saajaa ei voida valita ennen kuin syntyneen keskustelun määrä on tiedossa, sen jakaminen siirtyisi seuraavaan itsenäisyyspäivään. Palkinnon luovutusseremoniaan on ehdotuksessa kaavailtu sotaveteraanien ohimarssia, jolla tuotaisiin symbolisesti esille minkä puolesta he aikoinaan taistelivat.

    Presidentin kansliasta on ilmoitettu, että ehdotusta aletaan pohtia vasta kun Tanja Karpelasta tulee presidentti, koska vasta silloin voidaan olla varmoja, että suomalaisien arvot ovat muttuneet riittävästi moista hevonpaskaa varten.

    This comment was originally posted on Lehti

  22. en tunnusta says:
    December 2, 2009 at 11:22 am

    Marja T. kansanedustajan kunniamerkkiä toivoo takaisin
    Tasavallan Presidentti.
    Siten se voitaisiin antaa Kauko Juhantalolle tai Tony Halmelle.

    This comment was originally posted on Lehti

  23. Mervi Saapas says:
    December 2, 2009 at 12:51 pm

    Mitalit ovat yliarvostettuja. Lauri Törni-kravatti, Mannerheim-kangaskassi ja Ehrnrooth-propellilippis tuotantoon nyt!

    This comment was originally posted on Lehti

  24. Raatain luoda nyt meidän vuoro on says:
    December 2, 2009 at 2:55 pm

    Rintamakarkurien jälkeläiset nykypolveen saakka ovat syvästi traumatisoituneet armottoman hiljaisesta vaikenemisesta kuin myös isiensä humalaisesta sotamuistelusta. “Kertomukset kotipihan lantakasan tai rojuläjän hajusta ja väristä, jotka piinasivat rintamakarkureita unissakin, ovat siirtyneet heidän lastensa ja lastenlastensa, sanoisin sijaiskärsijöiden, uhrivalmiille harteille”, itkee desantologian dosentti Kummeli Näin-On-Näre.

    This comment was originally posted on Lehti

  25. Professori says:
    December 2, 2009 at 4:00 pm

    Ei ole kovin hygieenisesti kivaa esittää tällaista kansainvälisessä internetissä — Tällainen uutisointi vaarantaa maamme imagon ja brändin ulkomailla. Lehden toimittajien tulisi muistaa, että he eivät edusta internetissä vain itseään vaan myös koko maataan.

    Uutisoinnin painopistettä voisi muutenkin siirtää myönteisempään suuntaan ja uutisoida esimerkiksi joulupukista, Nokian kännyköiden laadukkuudesta, suomuuraimista ja talvisodan ratkaisutaisteluista.

    This comment was originally posted on Lehti

  26. setä says:
    December 3, 2009 at 10:30 am

    Noi alusvaatereklaamit on ihan lääh-lääh! :)

    This comment was originally posted on Lehti

  27. pra says:
    December 3, 2009 at 5:38 pm

    Nyt ihan oikeesti, vasurit.
    Nouskaapa edes kerrankin sinne barrikadeille, jotta saadaan hyvä maalitaulu. Ei tarvitse välttämättä piileskellä siellä paskakasassa.

    This comment was originally posted on Lehti

  28. Gröna Lund says:
    December 4, 2009 at 1:12 am

    Entäs me siviilipalvelusmiehet sitten ?

    Monta perunaa olen kuorinut ja piipullista polttanut maamme eteen!

    This comment was originally posted on Lehti

  29. Mal Johnson says:
    December 4, 2009 at 10:22 am

    Thanks for providing such good articles, this post just contains a month load of cool content’s I’ll surely devour each one of this..

    This comment was originally posted on Small Business Search Marketing



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