9 Sneaky Ways to Spy on Your Competition Using Online Tools & Other Tactics

When you’re running a small business, keeping up with your competition isn’t easy. How does your website compare to theirs? Are they attracting customers that should be coming to you? What about new products or services—are they doing something new that you should be doing too?

Most small businesses have no idea what their competitors are doing or why the competition is beating them in the market. But if you’re serious about creating and growing a successful small business, that has to change.

Fortunately there are lots of things you can do to spy on your competition and make sure you’re ready for their next move. Here are several ideas and tools you might use to figure out what the competition is really up to.

How to Spy on Your Competition

1. Set Up Email Alerts

This is so easy, it’s crazy that everybody doesn’t do it. Start by visiting Google Alerts. Enter your competitor’s name or product (or another relevant search term). Then choose how often and what kind of information you want to track. Every time your competition is mentioned on the web, you’ll get a notification. You might also want to try Mention which offers both free and paid alerts that are more comprehensive than Google’s.

2. Subscribe to Your Competitors’ Newsletters and Blog Posts

Again, this is simple. If you don’t want your competitor to see your email address, create a new email using Gmail or Yahoo before you subscribe. Then read each issue to see what offers and products your competitor is promoting. You can subscribe to their blog posts (RSS) using an online reader like NetVibes and see an update every time there’s something new. Feedly is another good option. Don’t forget to follow them on LinkedIn and Google Plus as well.

3. Ask Your Customers and Vendors

When you talk with your customers (you do talk with them, right?), ask them where else they shop for products like yours. What do they like about your competition? What do they do better than you do? And ask your vendors about them as well. They may be willing to tell you more than you would think.

4. Visit Your Competitor’s Location

Does the competition have a retail store? Be sure to drop in and look around. If they have a factory or plant, ask for a free tour. If they’re participating in a trade show or conference, make sure you visit their booth and talk with the people there. It’s surprising what information employees will share about your competition if you just ask.

5. Learn What They’re Doing with SEO on Their Website

If you want to see how your website compares to your top competitors, check out Moz’s Link Explorer Tool. You can check and compare your site to your competition on things like page authority, internal links, external links and domain statistics. The paid version lets you compare social shares from Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and more. SEMRush offers a similar paid service.

Another way to look at what your competitors are doing with SEO on their website is to open up their web page, then look at the source code (click “Page Source” in FireFox or “View Source” in Chrome). This will bring up the HTML code for the page where you can see keyword tags, title tags, and H1 and H2 tags that correlate to the search terms your competition uses to rank in Google. It helps to understand a bit of HTML, but with a few minutes of effort, you’ll be able to get a good look behind the scenes.

6. Watch Your Competitors on Social Media

There are several ways to spy on your competition in social media as well. Of course, you can follow Twitter account and like their Facebook page to see updates there. Or you can check out a service like SharedCount or Social Mention. Social Mention lets you enter a search term (try your competition’s name or a keyword they use in their online marketing) and they return all the mentions that term has had online, on social sites, as well as sites like Youtube, Yahoo Answers, and Flickr. SharedCount returns the number of likes and shares your competitors have on a number of sites. TweetReach is another tool that does much the same thing.

7. Get the Details on Your Competition’s Pay-Per-Click Marketing

If you’re using Google Adwords or paying for ad placements at Bing or another search engine, it helps to know exactly what your closest competitors are doing there too. What search terms do they use? How much are they paying? A service like SpyFu (not free, but very affordable) can help with those details. If you’re trying to get the jump on your competition and identify new key words to target, check out Google Trends, which can help you find the most popular search terms and show you which ones are getting more popular.

8. See How The Competition Has Changed

Using the waybackmachine, you can see what your competitor’s site used to look like. While this may be interesting, what you really want to pay attention to is the things that haven’t changed over the years. It’s a pretty safe assumption that the things that don’t change are things that work pretty well—and may be worth doing on your own site.

9. A Few More Tools To Check Out

There are other tools that do similar things to the ones listed above. Different people prefer different tools, so check out Alexa, Moat, SiteScope, and WordStream. They are all great tools—we’ve used many of them at Logomaker.

By watching your competition closely—both online and off—you can take advantage of new opportunities and changes in the marketplace to help your business grow. Most small businesses don’t make the effort to do this kind of research, so if you’re willing to do it, you could gain a significant advantage over your competition. Good luck!