Want to know what your competition is doing online? Spy on them ethically to help you get a competitive advantage against them!  The following is a list of tools that can help you uncover opportunities which you can use to your advantage and gain market share. 

Competitive Intelligence Tools

  • Real Time Search – Social Mention
    What are your competitors writing about?  What are people saying about them?  What are people writing about you?
  • SEMRush
    What keywords are your competitors using to gain traffic?  Are they running PPC (pay-per-click) ad programs?  What keywords are they using in PPC?  What do their PPC ads look like?
  • Compete
    Get insight into competitor’s traffic, engagement and demographics.  Find the keywords that are driving traffic to the website OR that are popular in a specific industry.  What’s the benchmarking standard in your industry, and how do your competitors stack up?  What websites are driving traffic to your competitors, and more!
  • SpyFu
    Helps uncover the best keywords, and create a powerful PPC ad strategy that gets results.
  • Quantcast
    Find out audience demographics and improve marketing performance based on what your competitors are doing.  (It’s like spying for marketing!)
  • Open Site Explorer
    Compare your site against your competition and find out how you can improve your backlinks to increase your authority in your industry.
  • Social Media Monitoring and Analysis
    Provides analytics and insights about your competitors – where are the communities that they are active in, who are their community influencers, how are they handling customer service and more!

Competitive Intelligence 101:  The Basics