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Five Ways to Legally Spy on the Competition

Having a website entitles you to no privacy, leaving every company on the Internet equally vulnerable to their enemies. Now, this sounds like a bad thing, but there is an advantage to this openness. EVERY company is equally open to scrutiny, meaning you have the same chance as everyone else to spy on the competition.

There is always a rival, in every line of work you do. Everybody is in competition with everybody else. Using tools already provided on the web can help you build a competitive database and show you where improvements within your website need to be made.

Without further ado, the short list of great ways to sniff out the competition:

  1. Spyfu – http://www.spyfu.com This is a great site allowing you to input keywords and see who is ranking for them, what other terms they are targeting and how much they are paying to bid on the term. It’s free and a great preliminary way to discover who your basic competitors are. If your keywords are locally targeted, you may even find some of your rivals in the building next door. If you pay for Spyfu’s services, you will get more information, it just depends on how much spying you intend to do.

  2. MarketLeap – http://www.marketleap.com MarketLeap offers a search engine saturation tool that allows you to compare side-by-side, with graphs, how many pages you have indexed in the top three search engines, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. It also allows you to enter the URLs of up to 5 competitors to see how you stack up against them as well as get an idea of how well they are doing in the search engines.

  3. NicheWatch – http://www.nichewatch.com This is a nifty little site that we stumbled upon in our quest for competition tools. By entering your targeted keywords (or your URL—optional) NicheWatch quickly pulls together a slurry of information not only about your site, but who your top 10, 15 or 20 competitors are, their site’s PageRank, backlinks, Yahoo! indexed pages and a few other commands. It’s free, all you have to do is create a login name and password and the information is yours.

  4. URL Trends – http://www.urltrends.com This site lets you perform basically the same functions as NicheWatch but you can compare up to 100 competitors for free and export the results as an Excel file. There’s also a really neat tool called reverse keyword lookup, which takes your URL and your competition’s and finds the target keywords. You are provided with a nice little chart displaying those results, along with some extra goodies.

  5. Quantcast – http://www.quantcast.comIf you have ever wondered the demographics for your site or others, this is the tool to use. You can find out the general target audience your campaign is reaching, things such as gender, ethnicity, household income and age, amongst other things. What’s a little scary is how do they know that stuff? Anyway it’s certainly an interesting tool, although if you and your competition are not listed in Dmoz, it won’t really help.

Google Operators

Google provides a variety of advanced search tools. One of the best tools is called “Google Operators.”  Google Operators are powerful search functions that can help you learn a lot about your site and your competitors.

The Google Tools we like most are:

  1. Site: This shows how many pages are indexed in your site. If you type:

    site:http://www.domain.com

    This operator will show you how many pages Google has indexed and it will show you the page title and page description that Google has indexed. If you have 50 web pages and Google only shows 20 pages, then you have some work to do.

  2. Link: This operator shows how many links Google sees from other sites to yours. If you type:

    link:http://www.domain.com

    Google, and even Yahoo and MSN, will show the sites that link to your site. In fact, this operator works better in Yahoo because it shows more links. Be sure to remove your links from the test in Yahoo by typing:

    link:http://www.domain.com -site:domain.com

  3. All In Title: This operator shows how page titles contain the keyword phrase you enter. If you type:

    allintitle: Alternative Medicine

    This operator will show you how many pages have this keyword phrase in the title. The more sites that have the page title, the more competitive the keyword phrase is.

Google offers lots of great tools, but these are the ones we like most.  To find more, do a search in Google for "Google Operators".