I was on the phone with a new member of the SEO Revolution. She had a problem. Her competitor was beating her company in every phase. She was frustrated.

We’ve all been there, right?

She was well educated, smart, and her company well funded. So why were they losing the battle online? There are usually many factors, but one of the main factors is information.

The company has the best information usually wins, right?

Right.

The first thing I did with her on the phone is do a backlinks check … and I went to Yahoo’s Site Explorer instead of a Google Backlink check. You get complete, non-filtered results there.

But before seeing the backlinks, SiteExplorer tells us how many pages are currently indexed. It was a shade under 9,000. Now, this was an industry that doesn’t require 9,000 pages of content. Myfirst thought was that they were auto-generating pages, which would be a violation of Google’s terms of use, therefore, we could do a Spam Report and get them penalized.

I was wrong. I’ve been wrong before … I married my first wife.

But it was better than that. I went deep into the list quickly, went to Page 10, nothing much there and then I went to Page 14 and there it was. A temporary folder for PDFs. And what were the PDFs? Purchase agreements for ALL of their past clients … and these aren’t just chump clients – the first PDF I clicked on was for a purchase of $347,000.

Now she can walk into the CEOs office and state that she has all of the customers, their names, addresses, phone numbers and what they purchased and when of their biggest competitor.

That information is gold.

How was it obtained? How did I do it? As Jake Baillie of True Local says, “USE THE DAMN INTERNET.”

Competitive Intelligence isn’t difficult – but it is a skill you must acquire in order to really compete in your market.

It also goes both ways, not just getting information from your competitors, but also keeping them from getting it from you.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 1st, 2006 at 3:58 pm and is filed under SEM/SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.