Sam Crocker did deliver a great presentation at SMX advanced, looking forward to this one.
Why, competition analysis?
- Defence vs offence axis. Monitor SERPs, replicate competitor links, get a link from competitors, etc
The goal: leadership and defend what you have but the attack is how you win
- Competitor stalking.
- Yahoo pipes. Using feeds and filter by keyword getting an output for you to see
- Undisclosable
- Watching your competitors subdomains: inurl:*.hostelbookers -inurl:www
- Find staging sites. Search dev.*.com
- Turn defensive tactics into offensive.
- Step 1: Find 404′s on competitor site
- Step 2: Find who is linking to these pages
- Step 3: De-dupe and outreach
- Step 4: Track changes in a competitor
- Step 5:Competitor downtime. Track it, if it is down for long enough, contact the people linking to them.
- Step 6: Competitor testing: Website analytics system profiler. Firebug. Go on incognito mode and see the changes
- Step 7: Speed. Webpagetest.
- Defend.
- Be careful with staging sites.
- Keep your eye on job boards, LinkedIn and patent applications to see what competitors are doing.
As usual Sam doesn’t disappoint, great presentation.
Q & A
What would you recommend to irritate competitor stalking? Not much ethical boundaries about this kind of stalking.
Dynamic IP scraping: how to avoid it?
