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?

In Articles, Interesting Websites, Research

Add Your Comments

Comments (41)

Ryan G
October 7th, 2008
3:21 pm

I’ll have some fun with these. Thanks.
Nick Stamoulis
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!
Armen
October 7th, 2008
10:14 pm

Definitely some interesting and original ideas here.

Stumbled!
Jack
October 7th, 2008
10:43 pm

Very cool stuff! Also stumbled, thanks.
John C.
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
Amit
October 8th, 2008
8:05 am

Very nice list with some original ideas. Stumbled+
Doc
October 8th, 2008
9:20 am

Thanks Bryan, most useful :o)
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.
Joshua Briley
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.
Emer Lawn
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
Brendan
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
Ann
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).
MichaelBurns
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?
smallbusinessbrief.com
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….
Mitesh Patel
October 11th, 2008
2:56 am

Great tools thanks dear share with us…
Jeremy
October 12th, 2008
4:47 pm

That’s amazing. Thanks for the tools! I’ll be using some of these pdq!
Lia Kay Barrad
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.
Tracey Halvorsen
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/
Doug McIsaac
October 13th, 2008
3:48 pm

Thanks for the list. I’ve been looking for a free website analysis tool.

Doug
Dev Basu
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.
Cashmere Scarf Shop - UK
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.
Nathan
October 14th, 2008
5:47 pm

Great article, some brilliant tools here.

Thanks,
Http://www.newpathweb.com
Jorge Barba
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
Scott Salwolke
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.
Kathryn Lagden
October 15th, 2008
3:49 pm

Great list. I found the attention meter site very useful.
Outrider Canada
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.
Nathan Rice
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!
oled tv kopen
October 19th, 2008
10:30 am

These are some great tools. I didn’t konw them all, thanks!
Jay - Window Hummingbird Feeders
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
How To “Listen” to the Web | Fastspot Blog
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! [...]
geld lenen
October 21st, 2008
4:47 pm

Ah yes! Thanks for this. I’m ready to spy on the competition now!
Five Favorite Stumbles of the Week, Vol. 6 | PR Prowess
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 [...]
Terry Van Horn
October 27th, 2008
7:25 pm

I bookmarked your site for future reference.
Spy On Your Competitors’ Web Sites | Business Idea of the Day
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. [...]
Ludier Pabon
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
A Ghoulish Collection of Links | This Month In SEO - 9/08 | TheVanBlog | Van SEO Design
October 31st, 2008
8:55 pm

[...] 14 Tools to Legally Spy On Your Competition [...]
Boosh
November 2nd, 2008
6:04 pm

Some great tools thanks for sharing.
Emily
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
Hendry Lee
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.
Ian Fernando
November 10th, 2008
10:59 am

this is a great list! there are many clones of xinureturns tho - but great list in deed
The Bundler
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.
BJ Wright
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.