By Jessica Merritt

If you’re in business, you almost surely have some sort of competition to keep tabs on. And in this day and age, you can bet that there’s some information to be found about your competition online. By making use of these resources, you can keep an eye on what your competition is up to.

Finders

Use these tools to identify your competition.

  1. Competition Finder Tool: Search Engine Genie’s tool will help you locate websites that compete with yours and allows you to compare them.
  2. Google Alerts: Set up a Google Alert for your targeted keywords and find out whenever anyone publishes a new site or information relating to your query.
  3. Related Link Suggestion Tool: SEO Book’s tool will help you find competitors by keyword.

Domain & Hosting Information

With these tools, you can get the dirt on your competition’s domain and hosting service.

  1. Whois: You can find a lot of information about your competitor using Whois, which supplies contact and location information where available.
  2. Who is Hosting This?: Get the lowdown on your competitor’s hosting company by making use of this tool.
  3. Domain History: Using this tool, you can find out who has owned a specific domain, who they bought it from, and how long they’ve owned it.
  4. IP Domains: This tool will show you other domains that are hosted along with your competitor’s, and may help you discover projects and websites that they are working on.
  5. Mark Alert: Make use of this tool, and you’ll be able to find out whenever a domain name using your trademark is registered.

Company Information

Get the dirt on your competition’s important filings, legal issues, and more.

  1. EDGAR: The Security and Exchange Commission’s database will help you find company filings on your competitors.
  2. Better Business Bureau: Find out what customers are saying about your competition by checking with the Better Business Bureau.
  3. Yahoo! Finance: You can get plenty of information about publicly traded companies using finance sites like Yahoo!’s.
  4. Hoover’s: Another excellent source of information on publicly traded companies is Hoover’s. The site sometimes offers information for privately held firms as well.
  5. Company Profile Report: Dun & Bradstreet’s information tool can help you locate sales, contacts, and more.
  6. Trademark Electronic Search System: Look for any trademarks your competitor has filed by using this tool.
  7. KnowX: You can find out if your competitor is involved in any legal battles by searching records with KnowX.
  8. Patent Electronic Business Center: Get a look at your competitor’s published patent applications with this tool.

On Their Website

You can find out a lot about your competition by just checking out their website, sometimes with the help of tools.

  1. Source code: Read the source code behind your competitor’s website, and you can learn about their meta tag keywords and more.
  2. SpyderMate: Use SpyderMate to crawl your competitor’s site and find the strengths and weaknesses of what they offer.
  3. Robots.txt: Take a look at your competitor’s robots.txt file (generally located at www.yourcompetitor.com/robots.txt) to find out what they’re hiding from search engines.
  4. Their blog: You can subscribe to and read your competitor’s blog to see what they’re up to.

Search Engine Tools

Use these search engine tools to find dirt on your competition.

  1. Google Trends: You can check out a website’s traffic estimates, related websites, visitor countries, and more using Google Trends.
  2. MarketLeap: Find out your competitor’s search engine saturation and history by using this tool.
  3. IndexRank: This tool will help you find out how well you’re getting indexed on Google compared to your competitors.
  4. URLTrends: Find out which keywords your competitor’s site ranks for using this tool.
  5. Incoming links: Search for your competitors’ incoming links by visiting link:yourcompetition.com.
  6. SearchRascal: Find the top rankings for a set of keywords on Google and other search engines, and find out how they have changed over time.
  7. Search Status: Get highlighted nofollow links, PageRank, Alexa rank and more in your search results with this tool.
  8. SEODigger: Using this tool, you can find out which keywords a site ranks for.
  9. SEO for Firefox: This tool will inject competitive information into Google and Yahoo! search results, including PageRank, ages, links, traffic, ranking, and more.
  10. Google Search Insights: You can check out keyword trends and more using this tool from Google.

Strength, Traffic & Ranking

Evaluate your competition’s website strength with these web tools.

  1. SEOMoz Page Strength Tool: Find out how strong a page is based on links, age, and other factors with this tool.
  2. Xinu: Check out backlinks, ranking, del.icio.us bookmarks and more with this tool.
  3. SEO Analysis Tool: See how a spider sees a website to find your competitor’s weaknesses and strengths.
  4. Website Grader: Find out how your competitor’s website scores for marketing effectiveness.
  5. Alexa: You can determine your competitor’s traffic and ranking with this site. While you’re there, you can check out related sites to find even more competitors.
  6. Statbrain: This tool will use a number of different sources to estimate a site’s visitor level.
  7. Statsaholic: Get the lowdown on ranking, pageviews, and more using Statsaholic.
  8. Quantcast: Find out what your competitor’s demographic trends and details are using Quantcast.
  9. Compete: You can compare sites head to head and see how you stack up to your competition with Compete.

Keywords

Find out which keywords your competitors are targeting and finding success from by using these resources.

  1. SEMPhonic: SEMPhonic will track your keyword rankings and give you the dirt on what your competitors are doing with those keywords.
  2. KeyCompete: Find out which keywords your competitors are buying by using this tool.
  3. SpyFu: SpyFu shows you which terms your competitors are buying and ranking for.
  4. KeywordSpy: Find cached ad copy, affiliate data, and more useful keyword information about your competitors with KeywordSpy.
  5. Trellian Competitive Intelligence: With Trellian’s tool, you can get a look at keywords your competitors are getting traffic for.

Changes

Keep up with the latest changes from your competitors with these tools.

  1. RSS: Use any RSS tool to subscribe to your competitor’s feed and be alerted to any changes on their website or blog.
  2. Archive.org: Look through the history of a website and see how the domain has changed over its lifetime.
  3. CodeMonitor: This tool will take a snapshot of code on your competitor’s page and notify you when a change has been made.

Links

Use these web tools to stay on top of your competition’s link strategy.

  1. Link Popularity Comparison Tool: Find out how popular your links are in comparison to your competitor’s.
  2. Backlink Checker: Use Backlink Checker to find out who is sharing links with your competitors.
  3. Link Harvester: Take a look at your competitor’s backlinks using this tool.

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