What if we told you that marketing doesn’t have to be hard? It can actually be easy with the right guidance and tools.
To be the best in your market, you have to know and understand your competition. That’s why, if you aren’t spying on them, you aren’t doing everything necessary to grow your business.
Now, don’t let the terminology of “spying” turn you off of the idea. You’re not doing anything illicit or wrong! In digital marketing, “spying” means keeping an eye on your competitors’ web presence. This allows you to adjust your marketing and make the most of your own presence.
Spying is easy and gives you the tools you need to be the best. Every great coach or player analyzes videos and statistics of their opponents. You, too, should watch and analyze your competition. It’s a step everyone should take to be completely prepared to be at the top of your field.
Below are seven useful resources to help you spy on your competition. Once you see which marketing strategies are effective for your competitors, you can improve on them. It’s an excellent way to get ahead in your industry.
1. SimilarWeb
Entering a URL into SimilarWeb will tell you how much traffic that site is currently getting. You can even see how much traffic the site has generated in the last six months.
The tool breaks down the search traffic by:
- Organic
- Paid
- Top-ten keywords
In the free version, you can compare two URLs to see where one website ranks in comparison to another site. You can view the sites’ estimated traffic for the past two months, time spent on the pages, and page views.
You can enter your URL alongside your competitor’s URL to see if they are getting more traffic than you are. Then you can track where that traffic is coming from. You can use that information to improve your marketing approach.
2. Built With
Built With tells you all the technological tools your competition is using on their websites. You can see if your competitors are using tools like shopping carts, analytics, and hosting.
Once you know what tools they are using, you can enter that information into a site, like Wayback Machine, to see the previous variations of their page.
By comparing and contrasting the two, you can get an idea of what has and hasn’t worked for them. That way, you can get a good idea of what you should or should not be doing on your site.
Sometimes, you can save steps in the evolution of your own site by taking a good look at what others around you have tried— and ditched.
3. Ubersuggest
Entering your competitor’s URL into Ubersuggest allows you to see their search traffic, organic traffic, and how much paid traffic they are getting per region, anywhere in the world.
It even allows you to see their ten most popular pages by clicking on the “Top Pages” report. Selecting this tab will show you:
- All the visits to those pages
- The keywords that generate those visits
- The positions of the pages
- How many backlinks each page has (a page with more backlinks usually has more traffic)
- The number of social shares
You need this information because it shows you what’s popular. You can use this to help with your own content creation. What generates traffic for them is a good place to start when trying to generate your own site visits.
4. Buzzsumo
This website focuses solely on blog content. You enter your competitor’s URL and it will show you all the popular blog content. It will then break the content down by backlinks and social shares, which should give you an idea about what content you need.
If you want to see how your competitors are doing over time, you can narrow your search based on specific time frames. This tool is useful for identifying industry trends so you can create compelling content on your website, too.
5. Socialblade
Your competitors most likely have a presence on social media sites. This website will tell you how popular their social channels are by using data to track their growth and progress.
This data will tell you things like how many followers your competition is getting compared to the amount of content they post. For example, you might see that when your competitors post many times per day, they have a large number of followers. Yet, when they post once a day, they have a small number of followers.
You can also look at the content of their posts to see what people are responding to the most. Socialblade even includes information about earnings and future projections that you can check via their website or smartphone app.
According to their website, “Socialblade currently tracks 23+ million YouTube channels, 6+ million Twitter profiles, 5+ million Twitch channels, 206+ thousand Daily Motion users, and 416+ thousand Mixer Streamers.” They’re almost everywhere and can provide a lot of helpful information.
6. WhatRunsWhere
This website allows you to search by advertiser, site, network, and category. This allows you to see what type of advertising your competition is using, as well as their traffic sources and creative content.
You can enter advertisers into the tracker and it will show you all your competitor’s ads. If you want to see their latest ads, you can use the 30-day tracker tool to search for ads within the last 30 days. You can also enter specific time frames or search when the ads were last seen.
In addition, you can enter up to four advertisers into its “Compare Advertisers” search and compare them with each other. This allows you to see exactly where the competition is advertising if it’s successful, and the traffic details for each. This information will help you make the most informed decision for your own site.
7. SpyFu
SpyFu allows you to enter a web address so you can see all the keywords your competitor has bought on Google and how the organic keywords have changed over time. It will also show you how a website was affected by a Google algorithm change.
This site will show you which keyword groups your competition uses to get the highest conversion rates. You can also see how your competitions’ ad copy has changed over time.
Once you know what AdWords campaigns work for your competition, you can download those same keywords to increase your success. The entire AdWords campaign history is on SpyFu for almost 100% of domains.
One of the most helpful tools on this site is the AdWord’s Advisor Report. It tells you all the keywords you need to buy along with the expected traffic and cost.
Increase Your Marketing Success
So, there you have it! Seven tools you need to spy on your competition and use their secrets to increase your success! These tools are a great resource. Any company looking to succeed in digital marketing should use them.
Check back with SiteHub for more blogs and advice on how to bring your digital marketing to the next level.
