A secret way to improve your local business competitive advantage on the web is to spy on your competition and then simply outdo them. In this article we will look at how to do that using Google Trends.

Google Trends is often used to get trend information on hot topics and searches, but you can also use it to investigate the performance of your competitor’s website over a period of time.

Follow these three steps to get data on your competition:
Go to Google.com/ trends
In the search term box, type in the website address of your competition. You can compare two or more competitors by adding their website addresses.
In the new window that appears, click on the Websites link

Google Trends shows you the following data:
Daily Unique Visitors
The daily number of unique visitors that visits the site over a period of time is shown using a graph. You can change the time frame using the pull down menu titled “all years”.
By analyzing this data, you will be able to tell what years, months and days attract the most or least number of visitors and also if the traffic to the site is increasing or declining.
Regions
A list of countries where the site is most visited will also give you pointers on your competitor’s popular markets and you can even know which regions in a country attract the most traffic by simply clicking on the country link.
Also visited
This list shows other websites visited by the same people who visit your competition. This gives you insight into other sites your local business is competing with. You can use the same process to investigate them too.
Also searched for
This list gives you search terms that are used most by those visitors. You can use this list to add new keywords to your content to draw in more visitors to your website.

A final resource that helps you spy on your local business competition is the website called Alexa. Alexa is most popular for its ability to rank websites based on traffic flow.

Go to Alexa.com and type in your competitors website address in the search box and you will be given the following data upfront:

Alexa traffic rank
Traffic rank in the US
Number of sites linking into the website

To get more detailed information, click on the ‘get details’ button and you’ll uncover more secrets about your competition such as:

A brief summary of the products or services they offer, the percentage of traffic that comes from search engines, the number of years the site has been in operation, the demographics of the visitors they appeal to, how long each visitor takes on average on each pageview and to the site in total.

In-depth analysis of various categories such as:
Traffic stats- unravel the sources of their traffic
Search-find the top search terms driving traffic to the site from search engines
Demographics-discover who their most popular visitors are by age, gender, race, education and location
Contact- find out who owns the site, their contact and the size of their company
Reviews- check out positive and negative reviews about the site
Related links- shows the link network they have developed
Clickstream-shows you the sites visitors go to after visiting the competitors site (downstream) and the sites they visited immediately before landing on their site (upstream)

I hope that this series of articles on how to legally spy on your competition has given you the tools to measure the strengths and weaknesses of your competition and enabled you to compare your local business to theirs so that you can outsmart them.

If you have been struggling to improve your rankings and wonder why your competition always seems to outrank you, there are resources available that will unmask their strengths and weaknesses. In this article we look at how to do this using Quantcast.

The beauty of Quantcast is that it offers your local business great insight into the demographics of your competition. Demographics reveal the characteristics of your target market so that you can customize your marketing to reach out to them.

To get you started, go to Quantcast.com and type in the website address of your competition in search box at the top of the page. Quantcast will then show you some interesting information:

1. Traffic
The estimated monthly number of visitors per month in the United States. You can also view the number per day or week and the trends over 1 month, 3 months, 6 months and 1 year.
2. Demographics- the demographics are divided into the following categories
Male and Female
Age bracket-3-12,13-17,18-34,35-49,50+
Race- Caucasian, African American, Asian, Hispanic and Other
No kids and Has Kids from age 0 to 17under the age of 18
No kids and had kids from age 0-2
No kids and has kids from age 3-12
No kids and has kids from age 13-17
Annual income brackets $0-30k, $30-60k, $60-100k and over $100k
Educational level: no college, college and graduate school

To get a simplified overall view of your competitors demographics, click on the ‘demographics’ tab and Quantcast will display the people your competitor’s site is most popular with in the various categories.
Armed with this information, your business can tailor its marketing efforts to appeal to the same popular target markets and imitate the success of the competition. In our next article we will look at a third resource to spy on your competition called Alexa.

An email list is a great way to create a continuous stream of income for your local business because you can automatically communicate with a targeted list of people over and over again without starting the whole sales process from scratch. But how exactly does one build that coveted email list? First one needs to drive traffic to your squeeze page and secondly one needs to get them to sign up on that squeeze page.

Here are ways to drive traffic to your squeeze page:
Social media- you can drive your Twitter and Facebook followers to your squeeze page through your tweets or your business’s fanpage. The wonderful thing about generating leads this way is that your followers can help you drive even more traffic for free due to the viral nature of social media.
Article Marketing- this free method works by submitting articles related to your business to article directories and providing a link to your squeeze page through the author resource box or through anchor text links.
Video Marketing- uploaded videos on YouTube or other video sharing sites should have links that direct people to your squeeze page
Pay per click – if you can afford it, this is a very quick way to drive traffic to your squeeze page. You can place ads on search engines, social media sites or specific websites that have high levels of traffic in your target market.
Affiliate traffic- you can sign up affiliates who will do the work of driving traffic to your squeeze page in exchange for a fee per signup. You obviously have to consider the cost to benefit ratio before you use this method.

Having driven traffic to your squeeze page, it is now time to persuade people to sign up. How to do that is covered in our next article, “How To Build Your Local Business Email List: Part Two- Super Squeeze Pages”