Ever wanted to research your competition’s prices to make sure you are competitive online? In the past the only way has been to visit each website in turn to checkout the price against your own.

Now Google has added more enhancements via filters to the main search engine which makes this research a doddle.

FIRST – have a look at the standard Google search engine view for any product…….

SECOND – click on the “More Shopping Sites” filter in the left hand column

Check out the lists of products and prices available for all your key online competitors. You can easily see what prices and options are available online for your customers.

This is a very powerful search tool not just for your own research but for customers to check out prices across the online options more easily. However, I wonder how many customers will actually click on these filters and make use of the extra functionality provided by Google. Even if customers don’t use the filter, then it’s still very useful for your business market research!

Have fun……

Been meaning to add some quick reviews of useful small business website tools for  a while. So here is the first one…..

Last Autumn I ran some hands-on email marketing workshops for small business owners. I spent some time researching the best email marketing tools out of a list of about twelve. There is a huge range of options on the market such as Aweber, Mad Mimi, Constant Contact, Vertical Response, Benchmark Email, Campaign Monitor, dotMailer, iContact and Swiftpage.

I was looking for a simple to use solution, without too much clutter and functionality to confuse the user. It was also important that the costs started out reasonable and scaleable for future email list growth. For most small businesses they just need the basic emailing functionality, non-technical email newsletter creation and good website integration for Google Analytics and link tracking.

My final selection was Mad Mimi which is perfect for the small business owner. Having trialed it myself and with my “Non-IT Literate” clients the product has come up trumps. They also have an excellent online support team who are very helpful and available online during US working hours. Providing you only want to add one website signup list then this is a great tool to dip your toe into email marketing.

Google Alerts is one of the simplest and most useful tools to manage and monitor your internet marketing strategy. It can be used to support a variety of essential small business requirements, allowing you to:

• Monitor who is writing what about your business & yourself
• Enables easy tracking of when Google indexes external links to your website
• Enables you to track when your blog posts are indexed by Google
• Tracks people talking about you or your company in forum posts
• Allows you to track trends and people within your target market
• Allows you to monitor your targetted website keyword phrases

So it’s a market research tool, brand and reputation monitoring tool and allows you to track many of the Web 2.0 conversations happening across Google.

Don’t delay, it’s very easy to setup – just type “Google Alerts” into Google, setup a Google account and your alerts. Start monitoring those conversations (good and bad) about your business!