The pages you see on your competitor’s web site are just the pages they want you to see. Very often there is a lot of information on their site that they think you can’t find (and they wouldn’t want you to find), but you can find it. You’ll be surprised what you’ll learn about them…

Here’s the trick–it’s nothing super fancy, but few people have ever thought to use it as a competitive analysis strategy:

Go to Google.com and enter “site:CompetitorSite.com”

“CompetitorSite.com” is, of course, your competitor’s site and the “site:” part tells Google to list all the pages they’ve ever found on that particular web site.

If your competitor’s don’t understand how to thwart the search engines, search engines will find all sorts of juicy inside information on pages inside their site that they don’t realize have been made public.

I’ve found information that I know my competition doesn’t want people like me to know. Give it a shot, and you’ll be surprised what you find.

And if you want to be really nice, tell your competitor’s that their information is exposed and refer them to this web site so they can learn to better protect themselves–yeah, right!