You can certainly benefit from knowing what your local business competitors are doing online. Once you know what they are doing with their internet marketing, you will be able to do a better job than they are doing. There are many legitimate ways of spying on your competition – one is using Google Trends.
What is Google Trends? It is an online tool that gathers information of trending and hot topics and searches. It can also give you your competitors’ website activity within a specific time period.
3 easy steps to “spy” on your competitors:
- Go to www.google.com/trends
- In the search box, type in the website address you want to “spy” on. You can look into two or more of your competitors at the same time and compare their website activities. Just add their web addresses.
- In the new window that would appear, click on “Websites link”.
What you will gather using Google Trends:
- Number of unique visitors that visit a particular site per day. Shown in a graph, you will be able to see the daily number of unique visitors that go to your competitors’ websites in a particular time period. You can modify the length of period you want to analyze by choosing the pull down menu with the title “All years”. With the numbers that you will get, you will be able to study which time period has the highest or lowest traffic and if traffic is increasing or not.
- In what country is the traffic highest. You will be able to see where most visitors come from, you will learn where your competitor is popular. You can also find out which particular regions in a particular country has the most traffic.
- Other sites that visitors have checked out. You can also see what other websites your competitors’ visitors have visited. You will be able to learn their interests and use it to your advantage in terms of the content you can lure them with, etc.
- What your target market usually search for. You can also learn what search terms are most typed in by your competitors’ audience. With this information, you can tweak your list of keywords in order to attract more relevant visitors to your business website.
