To compete effectively in any market, you need a set of competitive intelligence data to help you gauge your position in the marketplace and to take steps to make the right adjustments. There are a lot of tools and sites available that can provide you a lot of useful data that can improve your competitive standing in the digital market where you compete or plan to compete. Here is some of the data that you can use.
- Ranking – Alexa.com provides a global rank of a website. This can help you gauge your overall positioning in the marketplace.
- Regional Traffic Breakdown – This gives you an overall indication of your inbound traffic by various regions and countries. Tools like Google Analytics, Similarweb, as well as Alexa can provide you with this information.
- Online Traffic Sources – This gives you a breakdown of information that your site or other digital property gets from various online sources. The various online sources include organic search traffic, social media traffic, referrals, etc.
- Organic Search Analysis – This information can help you to drill down and analyze various aspects of your organic traffic and underlying trends. Tools that can help you with this include Google Analytics, Spyfu, and SEMRush.
- Traffic volume and rank per region – The above mentioned tools can also provide a site’s traffic volume and ranking per region. This data is especially useful to have when a business is competing in specific regions, e.g. a retail site selling services within a country.
- Private Research – A business can do their own private research and get a lot of useful cues about a site. For example, if you are researching a blog, the number of comments on the website can provide you an indicator of a website’s popularity. Similarly, the number of Facebook or Twitter fans for a site can provide an indication on the popularity of a site. (Click to take online courses on starting a business)
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