Finding the right way to grow your business isn’t as simple as collecting thunderbolt casino. As you look for ways to grow your business you might want to consider paying close attention to what your competitors are doing. Today, monitoring your competitors’ practices involves both off-line and online observation.
Here are some suggestions that you can employ to spy on the competition.
Web Alerts
Sign up for Google Alerts. Google Alerts is a free tool that sends an alert to your inbox whenever something is posted on the web with a particular keyword. For instance, if you offer housekeeping services in Phoenix Arizona, you can ask to receive an alert whenever something is put up on the internet with the words “Phoenix cleaning,” “Phoenix cleaning services,” “cleaning services in Phoenix,” etc.
The alerts can tell you if you or a competitor is mentioned, if anyone posts a review about cleaning services in Phoenix, or publishes information about other Phoenix cleaning news or updates.
The same service for social media alerts is available through Social Mention. This tool alerts you if your keyword appears on blogs and in social platforms. You can see how many times and how often it’s mentioned. Subscribe to an RSS feed for that term so you don’t miss anything.
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb gives you several different tools so you can get traffic insights for any website. Type in a website’s URL and you’ll get rankings for country and global usage, a category rank of the website and a graph that shows the weekly number of visitors that the site has had over the last six months.
The tools tells you where the site’s visitors are coming from — organic search referrals, social media, display ads, etc. The tool also gives you ideas of sites and businesses that you may want to watch. You can:
- Benchmark against your competitors
- Reveal your competition’s online strategy and analytics
- Discover new partners, leads or affiliates
- Identify new players and emerging trends
Alexa
This is one of the more advanced and least expensive tools available to spy on your competitors.You can find out about another site’s traffic, linking keywords, rankings, etc. This is probably the best tool available if you’re watching international sites.
Other information that you can glean from Alexa includes:
- Average amount of time that visitors spend on the site
- Daily pageviews per visitor
- Percent of traffic that the site gets through organic searching
- Number of sites that link into that URL
- Competitor keyword matrix
- Competitor backlink checker
- Audience overlap tool
- Site comparisons
- Tool to find similar sites
What Runs Where
What Runs Where is a tool that provides you with digital intelligence about your competitors’ ads. It’s a resource that specializes in helping businesses watch the competition by:
- Allowing you to see the top performing creatives in your niche/market
- Identify winning campaigns that can help you strategize your own marketing campaign
- Reach larger audiences by identifying new traffic sources
- Access best in-class data across online markets
- Real-time information about your competitors’ marketing strategies’ successes and failures
What Runs Where specializes in online media buying and helping businesses buy correctly. It supports over 40 ad networks across the world so you can track your competitors. You’ll receive an alert every time that the competitor publishes new content or launches a new ad.
most Options includes getting results about mobile awareness, advertising awareness or both. Price: You have the choice between getting results about Advertising Awareness, Mobile Awareness, or both. The plan for both, the third option, is the popular and runs $299/month for the Basic plan and $700/month for the Premium plan.
Open Site Explorer
Banklinks are a powerful way to build your presence on a search engine. Backlinks involve links that take a web user back to your site from another site — for instance, if you publish a guest blog on someone else’s site and add a backlink to your site in the content, a reader will be able to click on the link and it will take him to your site. In addition to the traffic that those links engender, search engines give sites that have many external sites that link back to their site higher rankings in SEO results.
Open Site Explorer is a backlinks tool that allows you to follow your competitors’ link-building efforts. You can track the sites that are linking back to them regarding PageRank, anchor text and/or authority/domain. You also can compare link data.
Users find the Open Site Explorer tool useful to find out which sites are linking to the sites of competitors and compare competitors’ link data.
MailCharts
One of the biggest questions of any business is how often to send emailers, when to send the newsletters and how often the email contacts should go out. On the one hand, businesses want to stay in contact with their clientele. On the other hand, they don’t want to overwhelm potential customers or annoy them with too many email messages.
MailCharts allows you to aggregate emails from competing campaigns as a way of influencing your own email marketing strategy. Mailcharts shows the subject lines of competitors’ email bulletins, shows you how often the competitor is sending emailers and compares the competitors’ emailers to your campaigns so you can see where your emails stand.
Additionally, the tool gives you comparisons such as timing, frequency, subject line length, etc so you can compare your campaigns to tMailCharts’ archive to ensure you’re in tune with best practices.
