For over a decade, savvy business owners have found that good competitive intelligence (CI) is extremely valuable; especially when the data gathered is synthesized in a way that it is useable and actionable.

Back in the day (I’ve been at this since 1999) one method of CI involved selecting your most important keyword phrase, searching Google for it and seeing who is out ranking you for that phrase, then studying those sites for data and ideas that you could deploy, which ultimately would help close that gap between them and you in search.  Who links their sites to the people that are ranking in the  top 10 for your best phrase? Also, what kind of links are those link providers receiving? How many more links do they have than you do? How many pages do your competitors have indexed and what does their information architecture look like? Are they blogging? Are they involved in social media? [Read more…]