Spying on your rivals online may sound like an immoral activity or something that will take up too much time.
If you want to go down this route, there are lots of useful tools to help you do it.
Online spying shouldn’t be used just to copy others, but it will give you ideas of how your competitors are handling their online marketing.
From social media to SEO and pay per click, find out how to soy on your rivals online by reading the rest of this article.
- Social media
Social media is awash with chatter every day, minute, hour and second of the week.
Monitoring what’s important to you such as what your competitors are saying can be done using online tools.
You never know what you might find, from someone bad-mouthing your business to identifying an opportunity you hadn’t previously thought of.
Tools to try: Social Mention, Hootsuite
- Online reputation
Online reputation management is an important area of doing business online. Who’s talking about you and your products/services? Is what they’re saying true?
Using tools to spy on your competitors may unearth something they’re saying about you, but more likely will let you discover what people are saying about them online.
Tools to try: Google Alerts and Me on the Web
- Pay per click
Pay per click (PPC) advertising is well known for being competitive. Your own campaign may be doing well but how are your competitors faring?
You can use online tools for things like spying on what keywords your rivals are bidding on, when they’ve changed their advert copy and what impact that had on performance.
Spying on PPC campaigns is a good way to establish if there are any keywords or phrases you’re missing out on.
Tools to try: SpyFu and SEMRush
- Link building
Have you ever wondered what one of your rivals is doing to stay ahead of you in the search results?
The answer may well lie in their link building strategy. Thankfully there are spy tools for this too which allow you to see the sites that are linking to your competitors’ websites as well as how many links they have.
Tools to try: Yahoo Site Explorer and Open Site Explorer
Don’t rely on guesswork for your online marketing. Put these tools to use and work smarter to stay ahead online.
What do you think about spying on your online rivals? Have you used any of these tools before? Please leave your comments below.
Image credit:Igor
Digital toys are often better then real ones! lol
This is the 2nd time in a week I’ve heard of “me on the web”, I’ll definitely be checking that out.
Hi Dennis, was the first time when you read my blog post on it?
LOL no sorry.
just an FYI about your commentluv plugin,
you need to change your technical settings in the commentluv settings page and change your ‘url to use for api’ to not use a secure url https
change from this
https://www.searchblogger.co.uk/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
to this
http://www.searchblogger.co.uk/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Andrew Bailey recently posted..Major work ahead for The CommentLuv Empire
Thanks Andrew, I’ve done that now. Really appreciate you stopping by to let me know. Cheers, Jamie
Hi Jamie, I have a couple of tools to add to your list if you don’t mind.
Have you tried the SEO Site tools extension for Chrome? Take a look when you get a chance and it will give you more information then you’ll ever need in terms of keywords, Alexa, Compete, SEOMoz, Page Rank, Social Media and more!
I also enhance my Google Alerts with YoLink and it brings back more results then “vanilla” Google alerts.
Cheers!
Ileane recently posted..Blog Engage Guest Posting Contest
Hi Ileane, thanks for taking the time to comment. I haven’t tried the SEO tools for Chrome. I use Firefox at the moment because of some problems I had with Chrome last time I tried it. I’ll certainly take another look though.
I’ll be taking a look at YoLink as well, it sounds great.
Thanks for all your suggestions!
Cheers
Jamie
There’s a free wordpress plugin for online reputation management called Reputation Management for WordPress developed by Glen Allsop. I’ve never tried it but came across it some time back, thought I’d share it here.
Alfee recently posted..Travel Smart (And Light) The Travelpro Way
I agree all the things that you have said above, so true especially about link building. I do SEO tools and so far it do good to me.
Jimmie Lazarte recently posted..Tires For Sale
Thanks for your comments Jimmie.
I use opensite explorer quite a bit.
Yahoo site explorer has gone now though so I’m a bit dissapointed about that.
Haven’t used the social media tools before so I will give them a go.
Hi Jimmy, yes it’s a real shame Yahoo Site Explorer has gone now, it was a really useful tool. Hopefully it will be resurrected in the future as part of Bing’s offering.