Know what your competitors are doing!

To beat your competitors, you need to know who they are and what they are doing.

First of all, I would go online and identify a few main competitors for my company (other than the ones I already know). I would type in some keywords (the most important for your business or the one you have bid heavily on), and see who is ranking high in different search engines and is also serving the area my company has business in.

Then, I will use the following tools to keep track of what my main competitors are doing:

1) Alexa.com - A free and very easy to use site to track the traffic of competitors' website. Are they doing better or worse? If they are doing better, try to investigate why. What they have done and you didn't or what you have done wrong. Try to find out what kind of optimization they have done.

2) Watchthatpage.com - I use this to monitor any updates on my competitors' website. Some people would use it to monitor price drop or increase in their competitors' sites. It is a free, very easy to use automated tool. You just have to open a free account and register every single page you would like to monitor on the site. Since changes on my competitors' sites are not frequent, I have scheduled the tool to send changes/updates to my email address once every Thursday. A very useful tool!

3) Archive.org - This free site brings you back to the older version of a website, before it is updated. You type in the website address and then choose from any archive date they have available to view the old version of the site. Very useful if you want to check what your competitors have on their sites a few weeks ago, before their recent updates.

4) Marketleap.com - This free site provide you with the following tool:
i) Link Popularity Check - Checks how many one way links your site
has from other sites.
ii) Search Engine Saturation - Checks the number of pages a given
search engine has in its index for your website domain.
iii) Keyword verification tool - Checks to see if your site is in the top
three pages of a search engine result for a specific keyword.