There are quite a few Competitive Intelligence Methods we use when attempting to decide which vertical or markets we want to compete in. And before we do, we like to analyze what we’re up against. Here are a few awesome techniques we use almost every day we are working on Virtual Real Estate. Before we enter any vertical, we need to take a look at 2-3 unbeaten Enterprises in that market and drill down and analyze what we can find on them.

Competitor Intelligence Tip #1 – Find Out What Google Page Rank a Website Is

Another Competitive Intelligence technique swot analysis is to download the Google PageRank Display Software. Google issues PR or PageRank, They give Enterprises a Page Rank of anywhere from 0-9 depending on a myriad of different variables, such as age, how many back links a website has, how meaningful and on-topic your site content is, etc.. Essentially Page Rank is a measure of how important a website is to google.

A website with a PR3 is okay, a PR4 is pretty darn good and a PR5 is extreme. Our goal is to get our top 6 Enterprises we own all a PR5 in about 3 years or so. It takes a lot of work and requires some specialized acumen to do this, but it’s doable. Another cool feature regarding the Google PageRank Toolbar is you’ll analyze a small little black arrow that’s pointing downward directly to the right of the image icon. If you click this, you’ll analyze a small drop-down menu. One of the options I equivalent to to use is the Cached Snapshot of Page Icon which will let me know if this page was cached, and if it was, it will tell me the last time this exact page was cached.

Once in a while I’ll use this feature because I’ll want to take one of my articles on my website and submit them to other article repositories for additional back links. But I don’t want to submit any articles I use my own money for until Google finds them on my website first. By using this feature I don’t have to wonder when I should submit these articles because this feature will tell me.