Online Tools for Competitive Intelligence

January 18, 2009 at 11:02 am | Posted in Competitive Intelligence (CI) | 3 Comments
Tags: CI tools, online CI

Here is the list of the online CI tools mentioned in the video below. I separated them in free and payable tools, with a short description following each of them. When you click on the tool you can directly join the webpage and get started with your competitive intelligence.

(Source: Youtube)

This video shows many tools aiming to give an insight on competitor’s behavior in the internet. Here you may find some answers to questions you have always asked yourself: How do companies keep their competitors under surveillance, how can they control each step they make? What are the tools to do so?

“Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process of monitoring the competitive environment and analyzing the findings in the context of internal issues, for the purpose of decision support.”

If you wish to know more about CI tools and go deeper in this field you can visit this site:Search Engine Journal. This blog delivers the latest news on these tools and gives tips how to use them.

Free Tools

• SEO for Firefox (Firefox plug-in): it shows entire the SEO of any website: it is a good profile of the whole domain
• Seodigger.com: It shows the ranking of websites (of the competitor for example) in the national search results
• Yahoo Site Explorer: You can see all links who point to a domain, offers an email alert system
• Alexaholic: compares alexa from 2-3 websites, shows traffic coming to these pages
• Compete.com: which keywords are paying my competitors
• Watchthatpage: It is a monitor for the changes of a website
• Digitalpoint.com: It is a keyword tool: how is your competitor doing in the national search results
• Google Touch Graph: Relationships between websites: real networks of websites
• Xinu returns: Technical information on websites: Server used, IP-Address owned
• Netcraft.com: Information on domain and hosting history
• Wayback Machine: History of changes of the websites, here an example of Google
• MSN Labs: Demographic prediction: Companies can know the gender, age demographics of website user
• Google Alert: If a word of a competitor is mentioned in the internet Google will sent you an email´

If you would like to know other free online tools for Competitive Intelligence, please go to this Blog Article. These are really basic tools, which can help you gain a general image from your competitor. But be careful with the sources. The next tools I listed underneath are tools you need to pay for:

Tools you have to pay for

• Spyfu.com: Here you can search Marketing campaigns of competitors, and even know approximately their daily budget, the clicks the competitor is getting
• SoloSEO: You can check how many pages have been indexed
• Keycompete: shows all advertisers bitting on a keyword

 

Today, all big companies have an appearance on internet: They have a website, where, as consumer, competitor, investor, employee, you can seek and find information. But as competitor you need often more detailed information. You want to know the next steps your competitors are doing…In order to know this, you have to follow them, and the best way to do this is via internet.

If you know other online CI tools please feel free to leave a comment on this post.