Monitoring your Competition the Online Way   You don’t need a Rhodes Scholar to tell you that the global business climate, especially at the online level, is a platform for constant transformation. Dynamism, in-depth business intelligence, and competitiveness drive the markets. As the owner of an online commerce venture, you are the key decision maker. Anticipating the next move of your online competition is crucial to maintaining a critical edge and staying ahead of the competition. The power of the World Wide Web is a major tool in your armory that can give you the information on your competitors that puts you on the top of your game.

Page and Position Rankings
To begin with, you must first determine what exactly is the rank of your competitors with in the appropriate search results on major search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo. If your competition has a higher ranking than you both in terms of the position in the search engine results as well as a page rank, it indicates to potential customers that they are considered a better authority and there content is much more relevant to your niche. You must then direct your efforts towards making your website search engine friendly. You can either higher experts called SEOs or educate yourself about search engine optimization to improve your page and position rank.

Link Building and your Competition
If your product or service category happens to be quite competitive in the online marketplace, obtaining high page ranking is not going to be a piece of cake. As an example, a website selling books falls in a category that is extremely competitive as opposed to a site selling say, books on the art of dancing. Consider maintaining a keen watch on your competitors to see if they ever get a large number of links from other websites into their own site, especially those sites that have higher page ranking. This process is called link building. If your competition has more back links than you do, hire a smart SEO to work on it and beat them while you remain focused on the core functions of your online business.

Targeting Online Customers within Familiar Spaces
It is vital for you to identify the customers your competitors are targeting. You need to target them too.  Are they students, working professionals, home makers or other business owners? In order to arrive at a plausible explanation, you need to go through your competitors’ websites. Evaluate the various differences between your own target segment with that of your rival online business. If your target customers are students, promoting and maintaining a presence on social networks like MySpace and Face Book makes perfect sense. You should attempt to communicate in the same language as the segment you are targeting.

Is your Competition Visiting Online Communities?
Google your competition to see where they are going to indirectly promote their websites. Prospects are frequently drawn to communities -- blogs, e-zines, forums, discussion lists and group sites-- where they can share their expertise and opinion and read unique content. These sites are considered as an authority in the product they are dealing with by search engines. This is an excellent way to find out what your competition is quietly up to. Clone their strategy. Emulate them and do a better job than them!

Internal Forums and Corporate Blogs
Discretely checking your competitors’ websites for online forums and corporate blogs they just might have created on their sites is also a great idea.

By visiting the corporate blogs and social forums of your competitors, you can keep track of new products, modified prices, special promotions, incentive programs, online sales, support service quality, product issues and other features. You can make changes accordingly to your own products and related services. Use RSS from the other end of the spectrum. Sign up for RSS and meticulously weed the feed! Be sure to read all press releases very carefully. You can learn more from the press releases put out by your competition than you think.

Incidentally, there is tons of information available  on your competition that never makes it to the Internet or never gets indexed by the search engines. But that’s a tale for the future. So stay tuned!

The Ongoing Nature of Competition Monitoring
Tracking your competitors can be a time-consuming and in some cases an expensive proposition. Never the less, by using some of the simple strategies we have outlined above, you can easily outrank your competitors, and increase the quality and quantity of your website traffic. Rest assured, this is bound to show up on your bottom line in no time.