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25 Tools to Spy on Your Competitors

Spying on the competition is something that we all do, from sports teams to small businesses and huge corporations. Itโ€™s important to keep up to date on your competitorโ€™s strategy, the changes they are making to their business model and their products, how they promote themselves and see what kind of website traffic they are getting. In this post, weโ€™ll be looking into the 25 best tools for spying on your competitors so that youโ€™re always on top of any new developments and youโ€™re always aware of what their strategy is.

Why spy

Monitor anyย mentions of the brand

Monitor your competitor’s backlinks

Monitor the competitions’ SEO strategy

Monitor your competitor’s content

Monitor your competitor’s social media activity

Monitor their ranking and traffic

Other useful tools

Why Spy

To put it simply, you need to know your opponent in order to be able to beat them. Itโ€™s also a way of getting ideas and inspiration for how to improve your business and the way you promote it. Here are some of the ways spying on the competition can help you:

  • Find out what the competition is doing best and what theyโ€™re failing at โ€“ how can you do it even better than them? What can you learn from their mistakes?
  • What type of content are they writing and sharing? Is it better than yours, or getting more engagement on the blog and social media than you do? What can you learn from the competition about the content you provide?
  • How do they promote their business? What marketing strategies are they employing โ€“ and are they working for them?
  • What is the social media activity like? How much engagement do they get? If they are getting more followers and engagement than you do โ€“ why is that, and how can you remedy the situation?

[clickToTweet tweet=”The 25 Tools to Spy on Your Competitors via @lilachbullock” quote=”The 20 Tools to Spy on Your Competitors via @lilachbullock”]

How to spy

Monitor anyย mentions of the brand

1. Google Alerts

In order to keep up with every move the competition is making and any mention of their name online, the easiest way is to set up a Google Alert.

20 tools to spy on your competitors

Itโ€™s probably the easiest, cheapest and fastest way to make sure youโ€™re up to date on every mention of your competitorโ€™s brand.

2. Mention

Mention is a really great tool for monitoring any mentions of yourself, but it can also easily be used to monitor the competition, as well as any other topic or keyword you can think of.

Mention monitors in real time, in over 40 different languages and check millions of sources, not just the press or blogs, but also social media, videos, forums and images.

20 tools to spy on your competitors

All of the mentions are updated in real time, and you will also be able to see detailed statistics, such as mention locations, the top Twitter, Instagram and web influencers talking about the brand, reach, sentiment, and more.

mention2

Another cool feature is that you can create multiple alerts that you can then compare them โ€“ very useful tool to highlight exactly what the differences are between you and your competitors, or perhaps even between competitors.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Use @mention to spy on your competitors via @lilachbullock” quote=”Use @mention to spy on your competitors via @lilachbullock”]

3. Brand24

20 tools to spy on your competitors

Brand24 is a tool designed to help you track any mentions of your brand online, in real time. That said, you can also use it to track mentions of your competitor brands so that you can find out who is mentioning them online, what theyโ€™re saying, what social influencers are talking about them and what the sentiment behind these mentions is.

You can also use it to compare any social mentions you receive against your competitors and search for any keywords, topics or trends on the social web.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Use @brand24 to spy on your competitors via @lilachbullock” quote=”Use @brand24 to spy on your competitors via @lilachbullock”]

Keep an eye on the competitionโ€™s search ranking

Are your competitors ranking higher in search engines than you do? What are they doing differently than you? What can you learn from them in order to improve your own search engine ranking? There are lots of different tools that you can use in order to find out what your competitorโ€™s SEO strategy is, what kinds of links they are getting, what keywords theyโ€™re ranking for on Google and much more.

Monitor your competitor’s backlinks

4. Link Alerts

Link Alerts from Link Research Tools are, as they put it, โ€œlike Google Alerts โ€“ but for linksโ€. You can use it to monitor your own links and backlink history, but for the purpose of this article, the focus is on their competitive backlink analysis feature.

Once youโ€™ve set up the alert, youโ€™re going to get a full list of what backlinks theyโ€™re getting as they receive them. Their LRT Power Trust features will let you know how valuable each link is, so you can easily decide if itโ€™s worth pursuing as well or not โ€“ which you can do directly from within the app.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Use @linkalerts to spy on your competitors’ backlinks via @lilachbullock” quote=”Use @linkalerts to spy on your competitors’ backlinks via @lilachbullock”]

5. Monitor Backlinks

Monitor Backlinks is a great tool for monitoring your own backlinks, as well as your competitions.

This useful tool will monitor your competitorsโ€™ backlinks and alert you whenever they get a new link that has good SEO value. It also has a keyword rank checker that allows you to monitor your keywords and then compare your rankings with your competitors.

With this information, you can create a better strategy for your website and get better backlinks to help you boost your search engine ranking โ€“ and hopefully help you beat the competition.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Use @monitorbacklink to spy on your competitors’ backlinks via @lilachbullock” quote=”Use @monitorbacklink to spy on your competitors’ backlinks via @lilachbullock”]

6. Open Site Explorer from Moz

Open Site Explorer is a free tool from Moz that allows you to easily research any URL and find out what backlinks a website has, discover any potentially damaging links and find awesome opportunities for link building.

Monitor the competitions’ SEO strategy

7. SpyFu

With SpyFu, you can easily find out what your competitorโ€™s keyword strategy is, as well as other useful SEO information.

20 tools to spy on your competitors

You will also get to see information about their ad campaigns, their ranking history for various different links, a list of inbound links as well as an organic search ranking analysis.

20 tools to spy on your competitors

Go to SEO Research and enter your competitorโ€™s website URL and youโ€™ll get a sneak peak into their SEO strategy, which is very useful as you will be able to learn from their mistakes, as well as from what they do well.

20 tools to spy on your competitors

[clickToTweet tweet=”Use @spyfu to spy on your competitors’ #SEO strategy via @lilachbullock” quote=”Use @spyfu to spy on your competitors’ #SEO strategy via @lilachbullock”]

8. MozBar

MozBar is a really cool all-in-one SEO toolbar that you can add to your Chrome browser and get instant SEO metrics for any page you might be viewing. You will be able to see and compare things like link metrics by type of link, see social shares for each page, discover any keywords used and much more โ€“ when youโ€™re finished, you can easily export your findings to a CSV file for further analysis.

9. SEMRush

With SEMRush, you can easily search for any domain, keyword or URL and perform detailed competitive research. You will be able to see what your competitors are up to, what their strategies in display advertising and organic and paid search are, what kinds of links they are getting and more. You can also use the data provided to compare domains between them. Overall, SEMRush is a really useful tool that will help you get better insights into the competition.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Use @semrush to spy on your competitors’ #SEO strategy via @lilachbullock” quote=”Use @semrush to spy on your competitors’ #SEO strategy via @lilachbullock”]

10. iSpionage

ISpionage allows you to perform competitive research so that you can improve your own strategy. You can use it to find out what organic and paid keywords your competitors are using and how much they are spending every month on AdWords. You can even find out which ads bring in the most traffic and who your top PPC competitors are, and you can perform comparisons to see whose strategy is working best.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Use @ispionage to spy on your competitors’ #SEO strategy via @lilachbullock” quote=”Use @ispionage to spy on your competitors’ #SEO strategy via @lilachbullock”]

Monitor your competitor’s content

Monitoring your competitorsโ€™ content can help you create better content yourself. There are several things that you should take into account when researching and analysing your competitorsโ€™ content:

  • What types of content do they publish: written blog posts, podcasts, videos, infographics, etc., and which one performs best?
  • How often are they posting new content on their website
  • How long/detailed are their pieces of content
  • What type of engagement is their content getting: comments per post, shares on social media, likes, etc.

11. Buzzsumo

20 tools to spy on your competitors

Monitoring the content that your competitors are creating can help you build a better content marketing strategy and provide better, more relevant content for your website visitors.

With Buzzsumo, you can research the best content being shared in any niche. You can find out what the best performing content is, what gets the most shares on social media, find out what backlinks they have and much more. Yu can also filter your searches to research the best content by time frame, by content type (regular blog post, video, infographics, guest blog posts, etc.) and by language and country.

Although this tool is primarily used for discovering the best content published in any given niche as well as the influencers and authors behind this content, it can also help you monitor your competitorsโ€™ content so that you have all the necessary information to create better, more relevant content for your audience.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Use @buzzsumo to spy on your competitors’ content via @lilachbullock” quote=”Use @buzzsumo to spy on your competitors’ content via @lilachbullock”]

12. Feedly

Feedly is primarily an RSS reader and content curator, but you can just as easily use it for monitoring your competitorsโ€™ content.

20 tools to spy on your competitors

Set up a folder for all of your competitors and then add their blogs and YouTube channels to get their feed directly in the app. This way, you can see what new content theyโ€™re publishing, all in the same place. You can also plug in any Google Alerts that youโ€™ve set up so that you can monitor any mentions of your competitor’s brands within the same app.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Use @feedly to spy on your competitors’ content via @lilachbullock” quote=”Use @feedly to spy on your competitors’ content via @lilachbullock”]

Monitor your competitor’s social media activity

By monitoring your competitionโ€™s social media activity, you will get to know what competitions, ads and other campaigns they are holding, as well as how they conduct themselves, how much they engage and how they do it.

You can do some social media monitoring directly from most social media management dashboards, by setting up monitoring for mentions of your competitorโ€™s username. You can also actively check their accounts to see what types of updates they post and the engagement that results โ€“ are they getting more engagement than you do? If so, why is that happening, and what can you learn from your competitor in order to post better, more compelling and engaging updates on your social accounts?

There are several things that you should be tracking when it comes to your competitorsโ€™ social media activity, such as:

  • Which platforms they are on
  • How much engagement theyโ€™re getting from their followers
  • What types of updates theyโ€™re posting
  • How often they are posting new updates
  • How long it takes to respond to mentions, questions, etc.
  • What types of campaigns theyโ€™re setting up on social media and the response theyโ€™re getting
  • Which hashtags they are using


To get more detailed analytics of your competitors, though, itโ€™s best to use a specialised tool. Here are some of the best on the market:

13. Agorapulse

Agorapulse may be primarily a social media management tool, but they also provide awesome analytics that allows you to compare your brand to the competition so that you can always be one step ahead of them.

Once youโ€™ve set up your accounts with Agorapulse, go to the โ€œCompetitorsโ€ tab on your dashboard to see how youโ€™re faring against your competitors:

20 tools to spy on your competitors

[clickToTweet tweet=”Use @agorapulse to spy on your competitors’ social media strategy via @lilachbullock” quote=”Use @agorapulse to spy on your competitors’ social media strategy via @lilachbullock”]

14. Quintly

25 tools to spy on your competitors

Quintly is a social media analytics tool for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn and blogs, all in one central dashboard.

The best part about Quintly is that it allows you to easily benchmark your social media analytics and performance against those of your competitors, as well as best-practice examples. With Quintlyโ€™s help, you will be able to more easily create a strong, powerful social media strategy that will make you stand out amongst your competitors.

Plus, they’ve recently introduced a new version of their tool, with features like “Discover” for bundling together all metrics in different categories and discovering new relevant metrics and KPIs, and Instagram Insights and Instagram Story analytics.

15. Simply Measured

Simply Measured is a social media analytics tool that has some pretty cool competitor reports.

For Facebook Pages, try their free Facebook Competitive Analysis Report to get an in-depth look at their Facebook Page activity and engagement. You can also compare up to 10 different Fan Pages, which is pretty great if you want to see what how your competitors stack against each other, as well as how you stack against the competition.

20 tools to spy on your competitors

For Twitter, try the Twitter Customer Service Analysis for detailed information on how they interact with their customers, how long it takes to respond, the level of conversation and more:

20 tools to spy on your competitors

Another useful report is the Twitter followers one. Knowing about who their audience is can be very beneficial, and itโ€™s also good to know if they have any influencers following them:

20 tools to spy on your competitors

[clickToTweet tweet=”Use @simplymeasured to spy on your competitors’ social media strategy via @lilachbullock” quote=”Use @simplymeasured to spy on your competitors’ social media strategy via @lilachbullock”]

16. Followerwonk

With Followerwonk, you can analyse your Twitter followers more in-depth, discover social influencers from your industry, search for Twitter followers and more. But the main feature for this article is that you can use it to compare your followers with your competitorsโ€™.

20 tools to spy on your competitors

Use it to explore your competitionโ€™s followers and to make comparisons between your own followers and theirs and see how your audiences overlap.

Monitor their ranking and traffic

Letโ€™s face it, what we all really want to know is how much traffic our competitors are getting. Luckily, there are a few tools that will help you do just that.

17. SimilarWeb

25 tools to spy on your competitors

With SimilarWeb you can search for any website or app to see what traffic/installs they are getting, as well as ranking by country and category, and much more. And thatโ€™s just the free version โ€“ with Pro, youโ€™ll have access to your competitorsโ€™ detailed traffic statistics.

18. Traffic Estimate

You can use Traffic Estimate to perform searches for any website and see traffic estimations and other analytics, such as their Alexa Rank.

19. StatsShow

StatsShow is a free tool that you can use to search for any website and get interesting stats such as the global rank, traffic, unique page views and even an estimated value of the website.

20. Alexa

25 tools to spy on your competitors

Alexaโ€™s competitive intelligence tools allow you to perform a more in-depth research. For example, you can see what kind of traffic your competitors are getting, what their traffic sources are and how many monthly unique visitors they have. You can also get demographic, reputation and engagement metrics and create site comparisons.

21. Quantcast

25 tools to spy on your competitors

Quantcast lets you search for any website to see what their rank is and what kind of traffic theyโ€™re getting. You can also explore traffic demographics, examine cross-platform traffic and even see what interests visitors have, such as shopping and media, and see what occupations they have and even what their political interests are.

Other useful tools

22.ย BrandWatch

BrandWatch is a very powerful monitoring tool, used in particular for getting insights into consumer opinion on any given topic. The tools monitor the web โ€“ social media, forums,ย blogs, videos and images and much more โ€“ to track any mentions of your selected keywords and find out what the sentiments behind them are, what customers have to say and what trends are popping up.

That said, you can also use BrandWatch to track more than just your own brand, but also the competition. With this powerful tool, you will be able to find out what customers think of the competition, what the sentiment surrounding them is, demographics data and much, much more.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Use @brandwatch to spy on your competitors’ online strategy via @lilachbullock” quote=”Use @brandwatch to spy on your competitors’ online strategy via @lilachbullock”]

23. RivalIQ

RivalIQ is a really cool tool as it allows you to get insight into social media, SEO keywords and website content, all with one tool.

You will be able to see a detailed analysis of your social media activity and how it compares to your competitors, which is great for figuring out how you can improve your social media strategy and learn from the competition.

20 tools to spy on your competitors

Another cool feature is their hashtag analysis, as it tells you what hashtags your competitors are using and which ones get the most engagement:

20 tools to spy on your competitors

RivalIQ also provides reports on various social media channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube and Instagram, as well as a cross-channel report.

Their SEO competitive analysis is also very strong, with meta description comparisons, keyword comparisons and Adwords spending comparisons:

20 tools to spy on your competitors

[clickToTweet tweet=”Use @rivaliq to spy on your competitors’ online strategy via @lilachbullock” quote=”Use @rivaliq to spy on your competitors’ online strategy via @lilachbullock”]

24. Compete

Compete is another powerful monitoring tool, as well as a tool for discovering business opportunities and the best marketing strategies in your industry and for analysis consumer behaviour.

25. What runs where

The best way to beat the competition is to stay ahead of them and always know what theyโ€™re up to. With What Runs Where, you can now track your competitorโ€™s ad strategy on display, mobile and native. Another cool thing is that you can explore historical data as well, so that you can see which strategies worked and which didnโ€™t.

[clickToTweet tweet=”The 20 Tools to Spy on Your Competitors via @lilachbullock” quote=”The 20 Tools to Spy on Your Competitors via @lilachbullock”]

Conclusion

Monitoring your competition is essential โ€“ most likely, your competitor is doing the same with you right now, not just to keep an eye on your activity and plans, but also to learn from your mistakes and success stories. Are you monitoring your competition? Which tools are you using? Which stats do you think are the most important to watch for? Let me know in your comments and please share if youโ€™ve found this post to be useful ๐Ÿ™‚

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About Lilach Bullock


Hi, Iโ€™m Lilach, a serial entrepreneur! Iโ€™ve spent the last 2 decades starting, building, running, and selling businesses in a range of niches. Iโ€™ve also used all that knowledge to help hundreds of business owners level up and scale their businesses beyond their beliefs and expectations.

Iโ€™ve written content for authority publications like Forbes, Huffington Post, Inc, Twitter, Social Media Examiner and 100โ€™s other publications and my proudest achievement, won a Global Women Champions Award for outstanding contributions and leadership in business.

My biggest passion is sharing knowledge and actionable information with other business owners. I created this website to share my favorite tools, resources, events, tips, and tricks with entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, small business owners, and startups. Digital marketing knowledge should be accessible to all, so browse through and feel free to get in touch if you canโ€™t find what youโ€™re looking for!

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