Have you ever thought about checking up on your competition online?
If you’re a small business owner, it can be really difficult to stay ahead of what new keywords are coming out and what your competitors are doing and what they’re saying.
Plus, if there’s anything being said about you I’ve got some good news. There’s a cool online tool called Google Alerts. Basically you you set up an email address with Google alerts to receive notifications from Google and you can specify terms and names in order to be sent notifications whenever those terms or names shows up in new search results.
This is really cool because you can put in all of your company’s keywords, the ones that you’re ranking for, or the ones that you want to rank for. Google will then alert you if there’s any new activity with those keywords or topics. If people are publishing articles or new page content you’ll be notified.
I recommend that you actually put in the names of your competition as well so that you can see if they’re mentioned in the news or in any articles and it’ll actually give you a real time look (within 24 hours) into anything and everything that they’re doing online, at least as far as what Google is aware of.
The other thing that you might want to do is put in your name and your company to see if there’s anything being said about you because you want to stay on top of negative reviews or anything that might be published or that that may not be putting you or your company in a positive light.
I was talking about reputation management yesterday and this is actually a technique that we would use to stay on top of topics regarding people and their company.
There’s one more little thing that’s not particularly pertaining to Google alerts, but you may want to set up a, an email account that doesn’t have to be your primary email, but allows you to go into your competition’s websites and sign up on their mailing list. Maybe even buy something from them and then just watch what their entire sales process is like.
What emails do they send out?
What newsletters do you receive?
Do they have any announcements?
Observe if they’re even paying attention to who’s on their mailing list. Because technically you should be checking your own mailing lists and make sure that you’re not being hacked by your competition the same way.
This is a great technique for staying ahead and making sure that you’re on the cutting edge of the search engines and what’s being said about you.