Gathering, analyzing, and distributing information about products, customers, competitors always help companies in making effective strategic decisions for the growth of the organization. There are various online tools available today that can help you keep hawk’s eye on the day to day Marketing, PR, Branding and other important activities of big brands and that of your competitors.
Some of these tools can also be used to track the buzz in the market around your own products/services letting you collect feedbacks on your products/services from the end users.
Here is a list of a few good tools for tracking, analyzing and gathering information related to SEO, Market Buzz, Social Media Mentions, etc.
Domain Tools
This tool will help you in finding important information about a website. It allows you to check registration details, IP addresses, Domain History etc. It also enables you to set up Registrant Alert to inform you whenever your competitors register a new domain, have one transferred to them, or transfer a domain out of their control.
Copernic
This powerful Web site tracking software monitors Web pages and notifies you when they change. It notifies you by sending an email, including a copy of the Web page with the changes highlighted, or by displaying a desktop alert. It offers notification for text changes, new images, view updated pages with changes highlighted Schedule monitoring to run daily, weekly or even up to the minute, watch for specific keywords on pages, and archive different versions of tracked pages.
Bit.ly
It is a great tool to shorten, share, and track links (URLs). It reduces the length of a URL to easily share with people and networks. The best thing about this tool is that it gives you link stat information that means you can track the performance of your link as in how many people have clicked on your link. Whenever you hover over a bit.ly URL on any web page, it shows the Page Title, Long URL, and any Click Data about the page the URL links to.
Yahoo Site Explorer
Site Explorer allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo Search. You can check the most popular pages from any site, find inlinks or pages that link to any site or any page, and also view the most popular pages from any site. It also shows your competition links, sources to get links and other relevant information which you might use for your website.
Wayback Machine
Using this tool you can browse through over 150 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. You just need to type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and get archived pages at as close a date as possible. It allows institutions to preserve their own web archive through a user friendly web application.
Website grader
It is a free tool to measure the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a detailed report that includes things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.
Google Alerts
This tool by Google keeps you updated about the latest blogs, news, web, videos and other happenings taking place on the web. You can add alert as per your choice of query or topic and get alerts in your mail box daily, weekly or as it happens. Google alert helps in monitoring a developing news story, keeping a track on a competitor or industry, and getting the latest on a celebrity or event.
Social Mention
This is an interesting tool to know what your completion is doing? You just need to enter the competitor’s name, product keyword and you will get the information on what people are saying about that Keyword across the globe. It will provide you detailed report as how many times a keyword was talked about, the time frame, and let you subscribe to an RSS feed for that term or export the information as a CSV file.
Compete
This tool will provide you with all the information you need for nearly 3,000, 000 website on the web. You can find business critical data, identify key changes in traffic/ trends, and get different analytic tools to take out detailed information. It allows you to compare different sites on a single graph. It also provides paid services using which you can get even more analytical information.
Statbrain
It helps you find out estimated number of visits that a website has. The visitor data is combined with information about number of links that point towards the site, country, Alexa ranking and other data that is available online. It does not allow you to log files or to get any counter information but can be used for numerous purposes especially when doing research.|
Hope these tools will help you keep a track of competition, trends and statistics which will help you in executing your business successfully. We welcome your feedback and suggestions on the same.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Great round-up and are all tools that I currently use! Hubspot Blog and Website Grader is one of my favourites on the list.
Karl
Thanks for your feedback! We will definitely bring more such interesting blogs in the coming future.
Instead of Compete.com I would list Google analytics.
The other tools you shared are definitely good for any kind of online business.