Tools to Keep Tabs on Competitors

On the flip side, it is easier than ever to track how your competition is doing on the Web if you know what you are doing. Here are seven different ways you can track yourself relative to your competitors:

1. Website Grade – Go to WebsiteGrader.com and run your website alongside your competitors’ web sites to see how well you do. Pay special attention to upstart competitors who might be more focused on leveraging the Web than some of the more traditional players.

2. Delicious – Delicious.com is an online version of someone’s browser bookmarks, so if many people have your site bookmarked, it means you have remarkable content. If your competitors’ bookmarks grow rapidly, it means the marketplace is starting to respond to something they are saying or doing.

3. Inbound Links – An increase in the number of links to a site can indicate that a competitor is getting more traction with its products.

4. TwitterGrade – Go to Twitter.Grader.com and run your company’s Twitter profile through and compare it to each competitor. You should track this metric over time.

5. Facebook Fans – Go to Facebook.com and see the number of fans your company’s web site has relative to your competitor’s web site. You will have to search around to find the company page in facebook. This number is worth tracking over time – if your competitor starts to gain a lot of fans, then it means their customer loyalty is increasing.

6. Compete – Go to Compete.com and compare their estimate of the traffic your site is getting versus your competitors.

7. Buzz – Go to Google and do a search on “your brand” and look at the number of results in the upper right hand corner. Do the same for each of your competitors. The number of results shows the number of pages on the Web where the brand is mentioned. This metric is worth tracking over time as it will let you know how your “buzz” is relative to your competitors’. You can do the same thing in blogsearch.google to see how your buzz is going relative to your competitors in the blogosphere.

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