Searching competitor sites for hidden gems and content

- [Brad] Hey, and welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips. I'm Brad Batesole, and this week I wanna show you a quick trick for doing competitive research. Now oftentimes, as I'm looking at the competitive landscape, I'll be looking at competitor websites to see if they have case studies or eBooks or other pieces of content. Sometimes that content requires a lot of hoops to jump through and I'm really hoping that I can grab it in a faster format. Or perhaps I wanna see if they have any hidden content that might be for the eyes of their customers, or even their internal employees only. Now, what we're doing is not illicit. We're simply using a Google query and we're going to use a variety of adjustments or modifiers on that query in order to see if we can find things that the competition thinks is hidden from the world view. To start, I'm gonna type site:microsoft.com. Let's assume that Microsoft is my competitor. Now, by doing this, I'm going to restrict my Google results down to just what is appearing for that domain. Now Microsoft is huge, so 49 million results is far too many for me to look through. The first thing I might do though, is see if they have any subdomains that are hidden. And I'll start by putting an asterisk followed by a period and then microsoft.com, and then I'm going to do a space and choose minus www, because I don't care yet about any content that's at dub dub dub. I may even choose minus blog, as that's another common piece that'll show up. I can run this search and now I can see subdomains that are in use, such as account, or flow, or careers. I could continue to use the minus symbol to restrict the searches. So perhaps I say I don't want careers. And I can continue refining this. Another thing that I might do, is type filetype:pdf. And now I'm looking for all the PDFs that are hosted on Microsoft's website. I could then indicate a plus and type eBook, for example. And I could see anything that contains the keyword eBook. I think you get what I'm going after here. I could look for all types of file types. You could look for doc, for example, and find all of the documents that are associated with this domain. And again, you can use various modifiers, in minus or plus format, to add keywords that you might be looking for. Give this a shot. You might be surprised what you'll come up with simply running these searches on your competition. Thanks for checking in this week! As always, I'd love to hear from you. So follow me on Twitter, via @bradbatesole, or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll see you next week.