On the whole any advice you recieve from experts in Business Development would tell you to ignore your competitors and devote all your attention into growing your own business.
However, it can be worth keeping an eye on them. If only to see if they’ve launched any new initiatives or identified a change in the marketplace.
Here’s our guide on how to set up automated tools to track your competitors for you:
There are a couple of online services which can watch your competitors for you.
Google alerts is one of the most obvious of these, the web address being www.google.co.uk/alerts. This service allows you to create an alert for just about anything.
Whatever key word you input needs to be in inverted commas, like the image above shows.
Google is constantly looking at all the new content on the web and indexing it. If it finds any mention of the alert that you have set up it will email it straight to you.
You can also tailor your experience by choosing exactly how often you want to receive alerts, where google looks for info etc. along with a variety of other options. You can also have a variety of different alerts set up.
There are also a variety of tools that will allow you to monitor specific pages. This one is called follow that page, and is free to use. However, there are a variety of different sites that offer the same service.
It’s easy to use, simply input your details and the site will then monitor the web address you’ve entered. Any time a change occurs on the web page, you will receive an email informing you of the change. It’s a great tool to allow you to monitor competitors sites and also any sites you have an interest in.
The benefits of automation is that once it’s set up you can forget about it, and anytime something changes on the sites and key words your interested in you’ll be alerted straight away.
If you need any help or advice, feel free to contact us we’d be more than happy to help.
