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14 Tools to Legally Spy On Your Competition
Have you ever wished you were Bond? James Bond? Here are 007+007 = fourteen ways to spy on your competitors’ web sites, without breaking any FISA laws.
1. Statbrain – Using several sources, Statbrain’s algorithm computes the number of visitors to a website based on offsite factors like backlinks, Alexa Rank etc. Statbrain does not have access to log files or any hit-counter information. Use this as a rough relative benchmark of your traffic to theirs. First run your website and compare the results given by StatBrain to your actual results to get a sense of its accuracy in your category. Figure out what the multiplier is and then try it on a competitor.
2. AideRSS – Find out which of your competitors’ blog posts and topics are engaging people. This should provide you with a list of topics you should be covering. Engagement doesn’t necessarily mean your competitor’s opinion is right or even agreed with — but it does mean the engaged people are interested in the topic and therefore why not your opinion on the topic.
3. FeedCompare – If you use Feedburner to track your rss subscribers you can compare the size of your feed to others. Just like in #1 above, figure out your own multiplier and then compare it to the competition.
4. Xinu Returns – Xinu Runs a report from multiple sites to tell you how well a site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking sites and other technical details. How well are you stacking up against your 5 biggest competitors?
5. Google Trends For Websites – Enter up to five topics and see how often those topics been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most. You can learn more on how to use this from our friend, Avinash Kaushik.
6. Google Insights for Search – With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames. Again, Avinash explains how to use this well.
7. Microsoft’s Keyword Forecast tool – This tool forecasts the impression count and predicts demographic distributions of keywords.
8. Microsoft’s Search Funnels – Customers often perform searches by typing related keywords in specific sequences. This tool helps in visualizing and analyzing the customers’ search sequences. Search Engine guru Mike Grehan explains the value of these query chains.
9. WayBackMachine – Go back in web history to see how your competitors’ site has changed through the years. Look for the things that have stayed consistent, because those might have been the most successful. In the same vein, what have you changed on your own site during that time? It’s easy to lose track, particularly of your own work, and to think of your current site as “how it’s always been”.
10. Web Page Speed Analyzer – Compare the download speed of your pages with those of your competitors to see which are loading quicker. Quicker loading pages tend to have an advantage at converting visitors. This analyzer provides a detail analysis of the page elements. For a rough comparison of two pages side by side try WebSlug. And, WebWait is great when you want to get accurate speed results from the visitors perspective because WebWait pulls down the entire website into your browser, so it takes into account Ajax/Javascript processing and image loading which other tools ignore.
11. Web Page Readability – By comparing the readability score of web pages you can optimize your writing and make sure that you aren’t creating overly complex sentences and paragraphs for your audience.
12. Attention Meter – Attentionmeter gives you a quick snapshot comparing any websites you want (traffic) using Alexa, Compete, and Quancast.
13. Websitegrader – Website Grader is a free tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective. Also worth checking out Twittergrader to check on your competitors’ twitter accounts.
14. Google Alerts – set up searches for your competitors, key employees, and keywords to monitor their activity.
Your mission, should you decide to accept it: Try some (or all) of the above techniques and report back on your intriguing espionage! This tape will self-destruct in 10 clicks.
Shhhhh… care to share your spying secrets? What tools or techniques do you use?
About the author
Bryan Eisenberg, founder of FutureNow, is a professional marketing speaker and the co-author of New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling books Call to Action and Waiting For Your Cat to Bark and Always Be Testing. You can friend him on Facebook or Twitter.
More articles from Bryan Eisenberg
- Nobody wants to read your sh**!September 21st, 2009
- Redesign? Ask The Right Questions!September 18th, 2009
- Cross-post: How to Improve a Product Page, Part 1September 15th, 2009
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October 7th, 2008
3:21 pm
I’ll have some fun with these. Thanks.
October 7th, 2008
7:43 pm
This list is great. Although I’ve heard of most of them, there’s a few of them I definitely haven’t. Bookmarked! Thanks!
October 7th, 2008
10:14 pm
Definitely some interesting and original ideas here.
Stumbled!
October 7th, 2008
10:43 pm
Very cool stuff! Also stumbled, thanks.
October 8th, 2008
7:33 am
You should definitely add UpdatePatrol to that list. It will monitor your competitors’ sites for updates and notify you when it finds a change. Invaluable
October 8th, 2008
8:05 am
Very nice list with some original ideas. Stumbled+
October 8th, 2008
9:20 am
Thanks Bryan, most useful
)
Here’s a couple I like to use http://www.Feedwhip.com keeps an eye on pages changes and tells you what and when.
http://www.Marketleap.com is good for Back Link info and Search Engine Saturation, plus over time you can build a trend.
http://www.dnsstuff.com has lots of useful tools from whois lookup, traceroutes, ping etc.
and finally
http://www.spyfu.com does some interesting stuff for free, though will try to sell you more.
Hope you like them. Best wishes, Doc.
October 8th, 2008
11:55 am
I just started testing a product called Market Samurai (http://www.marketsamurai.com/) as part of Ed Dale’s thirty day challenge. It’s a niche marketing tool, but it has some built in competitive analysis features as well. Looks promising. If you try the free version, prepare for the upsell… it’s coming.
Bryan, this list is pure schweetness. I’ve used many of these tools, but forget about them from time to time, because I haven’t generated my own list. This page will certainly be bookmarked.
Can someone point me to a recent Future Now post that listed many of the recent industry conference videos? I started reviewing them a day or so ago, and cannot find that post now.
Thanks in advance.
October 9th, 2008
4:23 am
Bryan,
This list is great. Some of the tools we’ve been using already, but there are some new ones on there that will be fun to test out.
Just thought I’d say thanks!
-Emer, Interactive Return, Ireland
October 9th, 2008
11:55 am
@Joshua Briley: the post you’re looking for is at http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/10/02/onclick-the-online-marketing-virtual-conference-mashup/
I, too, am partway through all those awesome presentations
October 9th, 2008
12:03 pm
This list is awesome, Bryan! I’m trying some of these tools now, and stumbled over another one on the way: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/
Most of their tools you have to pay for, but the web site comparison is free for up to 5 sites, and offers a comparison graph of things like pages/visit, unique visitors, velocity, attention (% of all web visits), average stay. The graph is not very helpful if the sites have extreme differences in visitor statistics (except for pointing out how one site is competing at a much, much lower level than the other).
October 9th, 2008
5:22 pm
Bryan,
Thanks for sharing this via FB.
Are there tools like this that will evaluate sites that do not rank within the top 100,000?
October 10th, 2008
12:05 am
14 Tools to Legally Spy On Your Competition…
How are your competitors performing on the internet? These 14 tools will help you learn what makes your competitors tick online….
October 11th, 2008
2:56 am
Great tools thanks dear share with us…
October 12th, 2008
4:47 pm
That’s amazing. Thanks for the tools! I’ll be using some of these pdq!
October 13th, 2008
1:13 pm
Thanks. Great ideas and additional comments. These tools can also be used for other purposes. I use the WayBackMachine to look at prospective clients old websites as they are usually calling me to say ‘we used to get traffic on our old site’. I use it to see what they did right or wrong. It could be they went for a change of the ‘pretty’ and got messed up code. I also use WebsiteGrader when I am contracted to optimize a clients site. I can then show the client a quick before and after score.
October 13th, 2008
3:47 pm
We add Twitter Search results to our Google Reader subscriptions to keep up on what is being said in the Twittersphere. Info on how to set that up is on our blog at:
http://www.fastspot.com/blog/2008/10/how-to-listen-to-the-web/
October 13th, 2008
3:48 pm
Thanks for the list. I’ve been looking for a free website analysis tool.
Doug
October 13th, 2008
7:17 pm
Very neat list of tracking tools. I’d say I use about 90% of these already, but I haven’t used Google trends and insights as much as I should be.
October 14th, 2008
5:05 am
Thanks for sharing all these tools. We are using few of these for our website but some are new to us. Its always great to know about all these from GROKDOTCOM.
October 14th, 2008
5:47 pm
Great article, some brilliant tools here.
Thanks,
Http://www.newpathweb.com
October 14th, 2008
6:03 pm
Thanks for the list, I’ve used maybe 4 from there.
Here’s a good one, Link Diagnosis (http://www.linkdiagnosis.com)
This nifty tool extracts the alt text keyword from incoming links to websites. Check it out!
Jorge
October 14th, 2008
10:59 pm
Excellent post. I swear by Google Alerts, not just to keep up on competition, but also to keep track of my clients. Some of these products I’m not familiar with, however, and I look forward to testing them.
October 15th, 2008
3:49 pm
Great list. I found the attention meter site very useful.
October 16th, 2008
10:06 am
Great list – we have been using Google Insights for Search more and more recently.
Marketleap.com has always been a standard to look at top-line backlink penetration.
October 16th, 2008
5:41 pm
This is a wonderful list! Love it. I am already playing with a few of them I have not had exposure too. The blog popular feed tool is a nice one!
October 19th, 2008
10:30 am
These are some great tools. I didn’t konw them all, thanks!
October 20th, 2008
10:29 pm
I love this list. I had been a big fan of compete.com, but with their new pricing scheme it’s moved out of my league for now. Another one that allows purchase of just a few days access of their whole product at a time is spyfu.com
October 21st, 2008
4:04 pm
[...] Just found this great blog post on how to spy on your competition – great suggestions! http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/10/07/14-tools-to-legally-spy-on-your-competition Great Twitter Resources! [...]
October 21st, 2008
4:47 pm
Ah yes! Thanks for this. I’m ready to spy on the competition now!
October 24th, 2008
8:51 pm
[...] their network, what can you do to get the real goods? FutureNow’s Bryan Eisenberg says there are several strategies, all perfectly legal, to spy on your competition. If you’re comfortable with some esoteric web tools, these look like they could be a lot of [...]
October 27th, 2008
7:25 pm
I bookmarked your site for future reference.
October 29th, 2008
3:44 am
[...] futurenow: Have you ever wished you were Bond? James Bond? Here are five ways to spy on your competitors’ web sites, without breaking any laws. [...]
October 29th, 2008
11:43 pm
I am using Affiliate elite, but I had no idea on how many other tools were there to test with, and spy legally on your competition, this is very useful information.
thank you
Ludier Pabon
http://www.bestguidesonline.com
October 31st, 2008
8:55 pm
[...] 14 Tools to Legally Spy On Your Competition [...]
November 2nd, 2008
6:04 pm
Some great tools thanks for sharing.
November 4th, 2008
3:34 am
Here is another link which will show you what adword company is buying.
http://www.ask2link.com/lab2/advertiser
November 6th, 2008
1:45 am
Obviously these tools have more uses than just spying competitors. But, is Technorati excluded intentionally?
I am about to use Xinu Returns to see how well it works for me, so thanks.
November 10th, 2008
10:59 am
this is a great list! there are many clones of xinureturns tho – but great list in deed
November 11th, 2008
11:19 am
We loved this spy list so much, we Bundled it and made it into a sharable widget. Click on my name to visit the Bundle and get the widget code.
November 24th, 2008
2:50 pm
We’ve used Spyfu.com as well as Google Insights in the past and have found them fairly useful.
I just tried the first one on the list: StatBrain.com and the result we’re off quite a bit, it also showed us to have a lot more traffic than our competitor, which we know not to be true.
December 6th, 2008
4:34 am
This is a list worth saving. I stumbledupon it and will give it thumbs up!
December 16th, 2008
3:40 am
Thanks, Bryan, to you and everyone else here who has posted their responses with some really good sites. I tend to collect pages like this one and add links to them on my site in case they can help anyone. The right hand side of http://www.brooksvillepc.com may have some useful links if anyone can find the time to dig through them. They all open up as _blank so you can turn off your popup blockers. Brian, without all the great people like you writing pages like this.. – all I can say is thanks.
January 1st, 2009
10:22 pm
Fantastic tools for online makreters. Check out http://www.newpathweb.com.au for more tips, tolls and info.
January 6th, 2009
2:18 pm
FYI, if you don’t mind paying, this Linking Analytics service http://www.ericward.com/linkstrategy.html rocks. We’ve used it for multiple sites. Worth every penny.
We run these for every site we have.
February 9th, 2009
3:19 am
No sure how I missed this originally. Thanks Bryan, much appreciated.
February 13th, 2009
1:53 pm
[...] 14 Tools to Legally Spy On Your Competition (tags: web tools) [...]
March 2nd, 2009
2:00 pm
[...] 14 Tools to Legally Spy On Your Competition [...]
March 5th, 2009
11:56 am
Excellent group of links. Thanks!
March 6th, 2009
11:10 pm
[...] For the rest of the list, click here. [...]
March 7th, 2009
12:33 pm
Thanks for the great list!!
March 31st, 2009
8:12 pm
[...] lista sigue, por lo que si te interesa puedes hacer click aquÃ. Comparte este [...]
April 1st, 2009
9:45 am
[...] La lista sigue, por lo que si te interesa puedes hacer click aquÃ. [...]
April 7th, 2009
12:16 pm
This is really good tools! tTanks for sharing. This will really help a lot.
April 24th, 2009
11:09 pm
The original post, plus some of the comments have some really great tools, thank you!!!
May 16th, 2009
12:44 pm
[...] [upmod] [downmod] 14 Tools to Legally Spy On Your Competition (www.grokdotcom.com) 1 points posted 7 months ago by SixSixSix tags imported business seo [...]
May 31st, 2009
12:28 pm
Great post! It is really amazing the kinds of tools available today for the online marketer.
I’ll definitely bookmark these for later use.
Chuck
June 16th, 2009
3:09 am
Great information. Have already bookmarked this page.
June 19th, 2009
1:35 pm
Great List – We are a client of FN and think you do a great job! Keep it up
June 26th, 2009
10:06 am
haha nice
)) great list!!
June 28th, 2009
12:22 am
thanks for sharing this list, some great looking tools to try out here
July 23rd, 2009
10:11 am
I just bookmarked this post. Thanks for sharing it. I will surely try and experiment all of the above list of tools.
July 28th, 2009
10:34 pm
[...] time-to-time to see what’s going on. A few days ago I stumbled upon an interesting article, 14 Tools to Legally Spy On Your Competition. There are some pretty interesting tools on this [...]
August 12th, 2009
3:19 am
is there a way to see the keywords that lead people to a particular website. OR.. the keywords for which a particular website is optimized for
August 16th, 2009
3:18 pm
With http://www.thewebwatcher.com you can track the changes on the competitors websites! Very valuable and free !
August 18th, 2009
7:02 am
This is a great list. Don’t forget about RhinoSEO Website Grader. ( http://grader.rhinoseo.com/ ) It offers the similar grading as hubspot but looks at other factors too like sitemaps
August 19th, 2009
11:09 am
Very interesting list. It’s a great addon to what I’m already doing. Thanks.
September 1st, 2009
8:43 am
[...] Popego (http://popego.com/) , o monitorizar a nuestra competencia (les dejo un buen resumen en este enlace [...]
September 2nd, 2009
9:45 am
Great article, good resources.
September 11th, 2009
5:21 am
Hi! You should also consider http://www.estimix.com They provide a nice summary of the website performance. I trust that you’ll find this very useful cause it seems to use the Alexa traffic information quite well and provides much better traffic information.
September 19th, 2009
12:09 pm
Thanks for those links! I’ve used website grader before, so I’ll have to check out the rest of the 13.
Alex,
Vom Bullenfeld German Rottweiler puppies
September 23rd, 2009
1:59 pm
I always use google alerts to monitor well known rss feeds and news for competitors names. I also use my own service, ezwebsitemonitoring.com to track competitors keywords and backlinks. Check it out if you have the time.
October 14th, 2009
4:56 am
Hi! I have seen many such websites that provide competitive analysis for free. My personal favourite is http://www.estimix.com . It seems to generate very accurate traffic information, too.
October 16th, 2009
9:29 pm
It’s great tool.
Thank for introduce me.
November 14th, 2009
3:53 pm
Thank you for the great list! It’s just what I needed.
November 17th, 2009
1:19 pm
An other online seo tools: Yookeo dot com. This website generate seo report about your website.
November 26th, 2009
5:15 am
Thanks Bryan,
No sure how I missed this originally.
November 28th, 2009
5:30 pm
statspy.org is a new tool, i hope it will be better then other inaccurate ’somethings’.
December 16th, 2009
2:41 pm
Ótimo Post. Parabéns!!
December 24th, 2009
11:22 pm
Thanks man for post.
December 29th, 2009
1:29 am
Nice compilation of useful tools. Thanks a lot
December 31st, 2009
3:52 am
This is an invaluable list! Thanks!! Great help.
December 31st, 2009
3:59 am
Thanks a lots. It’s a very invaluable resource.
December 31st, 2009
2:42 pm
The original post, plus some of the comments have some really great tools, thank you.
January 1st, 2010
9:51 pm
thanks for that post, is that useful for me, sorry about my english.
January 2nd, 2010
12:40 pm
Thanks for post. Very good. By!!
January 3rd, 2010
5:31 am
Ótimas dicas, gostei da matéria e do assunto abordado. Feliz 2010!!
January 8th, 2010
7:24 pm
Muito bom seu artigo. Interessante mesmo
January 8th, 2010
7:25 pm
Thanks for post!!!
January 18th, 2010
8:49 am
You’re so awesome for posting this. Thank you very much. I had never even heard of a lot of these tools. I know there are a lot of SEOs mad at you right now. Lol, just kidding, but thank you very much.
January 20th, 2010
8:24 am
indeed a good list
January 23rd, 2010
9:37 am
use google alerts to monitor well known rss feeds and news for competitors names. I also Personally I am a big fan of google alerts. Just checked ezwebsitemonitoring.com to track competitors keywords and backlinks, and it is relevant. Also, don’t forget about RhinoSEO Website Grader.
January 29th, 2010
9:18 am
This is really a nice tricks to spy.
I use mostof the times http://www.doloop.com
February 1st, 2010
5:32 pm
I love that tool – http://www.surcentro.com
February 8th, 2010
10:43 pm
I prefer Google Trends to other because it can show history report of search.
March 15th, 2010
6:56 am
Thank you for the awesome list! Would like to add versionista.com as a solid tool to track changes in content of your competitor’s webpages.
March 21st, 2010
1:12 am
[...] 14 Tools to Legally Spy On Your Competition [...]
March 29th, 2010
10:40 am
well this is better i think u have to give better explanation about seo
March 31st, 2010
12:36 am
Bryan, thanks for sharing your helpful post. I just bookmarked this page, will visit this site often. Cheers!
March 31st, 2010
11:53 am
Awesome post, this is something I wanted for a while. Some of these tools are very interesting!SEO keeps on innovating.
April 10th, 2010
4:04 pm
bryan, thanks for the great list. best tom
May 4th, 2010
8:50 am
Excellent tools. But you forgot semrush and the like.
May 13th, 2010
4:32 am
Thanks. Great ideas and additional comments. These tools can also be used for other purposes. I use the WayBackMachine to look at prospective clients old websites as they are usually calling me to say ‘we used to get traffic on our old site’. I use it to see what they did right or wrong. It could be they went for a change of the ‘pretty’ and got messed up code. I also use WebsiteGrader when I am contracted to optimize a clients site.
May 16th, 2010
2:37 am
Thanks for this great list of websites. This will come to great use
May 17th, 2010
6:44 pm
This is an excellent list since I just started re-doing my keywords and checking my new site structure.
Thanks!
May 27th, 2010
7:27 pm
Obviously these tools have more uses than just spying competitors. But, is Technorati excluded intentionally?
June 5th, 2010
5:46 am
Nice list. I just love the Wayback Machine! One of my favourites is of course Market Samurai to keep an eye on where my competition have their backlinks
June 7th, 2010
5:58 pm
Nice stuff. I am in a Master’s program, and these tools are starting points when working with clients as I have learned. Does anyone know how often though these companies update their data caches? Some of my stuff was old.
June 8th, 2010
11:38 am
#
I prefer Google Trends to other because it can show history report of search.
June 13th, 2010
1:13 am
Treads website grader and yahoo tools are all great and can really help out any seo compaign
June 25th, 2010
9:21 pm
to say ‘we used to get traffic on our old site’. I use it clients I’ve used many of these tools, but me as I have learned. they forget about them from time to time, Does anyone know how often though to see what
July 22nd, 2010
12:06 am
Thanks for the post. Feedcompare seems like a cool thing to use since I’m a feedburner user. So far I’ve been using the SEOQuake plugin for Firefox. Seems to do a pretty good job and I recommend it.
July 29th, 2010
2:11 pm
Tried this one: http://www.statools.com/ – not bad too, but only first level domains allowed.