Certainly over the months or years you’ve been marketing your wares online, you’ve come across a few key competitiors that you’d love to keep tabs on.

Part of keeping in tune with the niche you are in is watching the competition to see what they’re up to. Visiting their site(s) all the time trying to find their new content can be a real pain.

Enter the wonderful site: command. This little ditty can be used to our advantage.

When you use the site: command, you are asking the search engine to list out all the pages that it has indexed for a website (well, not all of the pages, but close).

Google alerts, on the other hand, lets us know any time a new phrase or word shows up on the Internet. For instance, if I want to know who is mentioning me, I may run a Google Alert for the phrase “Will Hanke” (with the quotes, of course). Every time someone mentions me (hopefully in a good way), Google will index that page, and it will send me an alert letting me know about the new page, and will provide me a link to said site.

So we can use the alerts in this manner, but instead of being alerted to a certain phrase, we want to be alerted every time there is a change to the list of indexed sites Google has for our competitor.
First, sign up for Google Alerts

In the ‘Search Terms’ box, type this exactly as you see it: site:domain.com

The domain.com should be replaced with your competitors website URL. There are no spaces.

Keep the Type as ‘Comprehensive’

Set your preferences and email. Now any time there are new pages indexed by Google, they’ll send you an alert letting you know about it.

Keep in mind, search engines only crawl low-level pages every 4-6 weeks, so don’t expect a bunch of updates in your email. They’ll more likely trickle in, but at least you’ll know what’s new there!