5-stealthy-online-tools-for-peeping-on-your-competitors-websitesThe battle for the web will never be won. Accept it.

What you don’t have to accept is being dead last in the SERPs. If you’re looking for a new way to get the jump on your competition, and keep your eyes on what they’re doing, here are some tools that will help.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a simple and free tool for monitoring mentions across the web. If you want to know when your competition is mentioned online, built an alert for it and you’ll be notified every time it happens. You can also monitor keywords. It’s up to you.

Some of the best uses of this app include getting competitors’ backlinks, monitoring social mentions of your company, and monitoring keyword mentions.

WhoIsHostingThis

WhoIsHostingThis is another tool that helps you “dig up dirt” on your competitors. Specifically, it helps you research the hosting provider standing behind the company. Why would you want to do this? To improve your own company’s website, of course.

Ever notice how some sites run super fast, while others run slower than molasses? It’s all (or mostly) in the hosting stack, and how well the site is put together. Find competitors with “impossible” loading times and you’ll have invaluable information about who will provide the best hosting experience for your own site.

SocialMention

This tool comes with a lot of features. Its focus is on blogs, video, and social media. You enter a search term, and then the tool tells you what’s being said about that particular term all across blogs and social platforms. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed for that search term so you don’t miss anything.

Most people use this tool to monitor and track keyword mentions, monitor company mentions, and analyze what’s being said across various social networks and platforms.

SimilarWeb

Similarweb is a tool that professionals use to get traffic insights for any website. Type in a website and you’ll get global rank, country rank, and category rank of the target site. You’ll also get a nice graph that shows the weekly visitors in the last 6 months. You can see how many leads come from search engines, referrals, and social networks. You can see whether the site is getting its traffic from ads, too.

You can add competitor sites, and compare traffic sources. Are your competitors scooping you on social media? Better up your Facebook game. Getting beat out in PPC ads? Maybe you need to back off it and try to beat them in other areas.

The pros use this site to get traffic insights on the competition, and glean insights into how they’re using their sight, and even marketing strategies. For example, for all of the talk marketers do about the importance of using email, many marketers don’t generate significant traffic from their own email list. Similarweb tells you just how much traffic your competitors are getting from their list.

Why is that important? Because if your competitors aren’t using their list, or aren’t generating significant traffic from their list, it means there’s a weak spot in their marketing – a weakness you can exploit with superior email marketing.

WhatRunsWhere

WhatRunsWhere is one of the most comprehensive research and analysis tools on the web if you want to spy on your competition’s ads. The tool scours the net and researches 120 thousand unique publishers, scoping out ads, seeing which words and phrases are associated with winning ads, and then delivering it all to you on a silver platter.

See how you stack up next to your competitors, and what keywords you’re completely missing in your marketplace. Want to know what your competition is saying in its ads? This tool lets you see that. You can also see how much your competitors are spending, which tells you whether you need to adjust your ad budget or not.

Author

Matthew Anderson is an internet marketing consultant. He enjoys researching all things related to online marketing and he also enjoys sharing his research to the wider marketing community.