It can be difficult to admit but your competitors are better at some business activities than you are, but you shouldn’t view it as a bad thing; you can learn a lot from your competition. Healthy competition can inspire you to be greater and if you take some time to observe what makes your competitors successful, you can discover some secrets that will bump up your company’s visibility and boost your sales. Additionally, you can also find areas where your competition is lacking so that you can sneak in and beat them at their own game.
But you don’t want to waste your day away stalking all of your competitors when you have other important tasks to get done. That’s why you should use some free tools to make it easy and painless to keep an eye on your competition without feeling obsessive.
Get ready to learn insights that will help you grow your business, take a peek at these six free tools to help you spy on your competitors.
1. Google Alerts
Google Alerts is an easy-to-use tool that will send an email straight to your inbox every time there’s new results online for a competitor you’ve created an alert for. Whether it’s web pages, blog posts, newspaper articles or even just a link, you can stay up-to-date whenever your competitor is mentioned on the web.
For instance, you can identify if a competitor is getting mentioned a lot by a certain publication, then you can reach out to them and get a mention too. And of course, you can also create an alert for your own company to track your mentions in comparison.
2. Social Mention
Social Mention is a social media search engine that can search user-generated content such as blogs, images, video, comments and more for mentions of a company or keyword.
You can track and analyze all the instances your competitor is mentioned by someone on a social network like Facebook, Twitter and even Reddit. The tool also analyzes “Passion” – how many times the same author has mentioned your competitor – as well as “Sentiment” – the ratio of positive mentions to negative mentions.
3. BuzzSumo
Want to create content that gets a ton of engagement like your competition does? BuzzSumo is one of the best tools available for content marketing and spying on your competition. With this tool you can enter the domain of your competition and see what content is performing the best for them.
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Buzzsumo will display how many shares they get on social media and who their biggest influencers are. This valuable information will help you analyze the top performing content topics and formats so that you can step up your content marketing game.
4. Likealyzer
Facebook pages are a great way to increase engagement with your audience and if you want to do it better than your competitor you need the Likealyzer tool. Likealyzer will give you a free report on how your competitor’s Facebook page is performing over all and gives insights to how it can be improved.
By knowing what your competitor is missing from their Facebook strategy, you can swoop in and improve your own page to perform better where they lack.
5. Woorank
If you want a nice, quick overview of a competitor’s site and what they’re doing, then Woorank is the tool for you. Enter your competitor’s website url and Woorank will spit out a report on a range of information including website health, website speed, server downtime, SERP views, backlinks and much more.
Whether you own an online business or you’re a blogger, these insights will help you ensure your website is just as good as your competitors and give you tips on how to surpass them.
Spying on your competitors is a must if you want to grow your business and put yourself ahead of the pack. In fact, your competitors are probably spying on you right now. So, start utilizing these awesome free tools and start getting insights that will take your business to the next level.