In today’s super competitive online market it is essential that you learn as much about your competition as possible if you wish to surpass them. The good news is there are plenty of tools online that will allow you to do just that. The sooner you start keeping an eye on other businesses in your niche the better, because they probably already have an eye on you!

How to Spy on Your Competitors

1. Spyfu

Spyfu is a great little tool that can help you quickly see what keywords your competitors are bidding on via Google AdWords, what their daily budget is, how many clicks they are getting and much more.

2. KeywordSpy

KeywordSpy has a free trial but its true power is in its paid packages which have an extensive list of tools that can help you with many kinds of advanced competitor research and tracking, sure to give you an edge of your online competitors.

3. Compete

Compete.com can quickly tell you how many unique visitors and visits a site gets at any given time, but to get access to really cool features such as page views, visits per person, attention, referral analytics and search analytics you need to sign up for their pro version.

4. SEO Book Toolbar

This Toolbar provides a wealth of data quickly in your browser from various sites such as Yahoo Linkdomain, Compete, Archive.org and SEM Rush. It also comes with RankCheck which allows you to see where a website ranks for specific keywords and has a cool SEO XRay which can give you meta tag information, number of external links, internal links and so on.

5. Link Harvester

Link Harvester allows you to quickly analyze a competitor backlinks and sort out duplicate links from the same site easily. It does not give you the anchor text used, but does give you a breakdown of .edu links and number of c block IP addresses.

6. SEM Rush

SEM Rush is another great program for spying on organic and paid listings of your competitors. You can figure out what keywords they are using, spending budgets, traffic estimates and best of all, it will help you fine tune your own campaigns with all this data.

7. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is probably my favorite tool on the list because it sends you alerts for keyword phrases that you want, when you want. So enter in your competitors business name and any other important industry phrases to keep an eye on who is linking to and talking about what.

8. Yahoo Alerts

Yahoo Alerts is pretty much like the Google version where you can set up alerts for keywords or phrases and have those alerts sent via email, instant message, pager, or cell phone.

9. Whois

Whois is an old school research tool that gives you tons of SEO data, indexed data and most importantly registry data to help you learn more about your online competition.

10. Archive.org

Archive.org is an interesting website that lets you see how websites appeared many years into the past so you can see a progression.

11. Check Backlinks

One great way to see how a website is increasing its traffic and search engine rankings is to check backlinks with Yahoo Linkdomain. Installing the SEOBook Toolbar will allow you to check these baclinks for the domain and individual pages. Note that it takes a while if it all for links to show up under here, so it won’t show the entire picture.

12. Monitor Their Sitemap

Monitoring your competitors sitemap will help you find newly created pages and allow you to keep track of content on old pages for updates such as new job openings on a career page. This can help you figure out how their website and business is expanding.

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