8 digital marketing tools to "spy" on your competition

When we hear the word spy automatically a character in a black suit and raincoat comes to mind who mysteriously reads a newspaper, while he observes what happens around him... we are very influenced by gangster movies, do you agree? In digital marketing, spying fortunately means something else, it means knowing the strengths and weaknesses of our competitors, which will help us to develop an effective strategy and stand out above them. In any marketing strategy it is essential to carry out a good study of everything that our most direct competitors do in the different online advertising channels in which they have a presence. It is not about copying their content or the techniques they use, but about improving what they have and offering a better service. 

Analyzing what our competition does will help us to …

1. Have an overview of the market and know where it is going.
2. Know what type of communication they use with their clients and which one is more effective.
3. Know your weak points and see your failed attempts. This will allow us not to make the same mistakes.
4. Get ideas about content that has already been published and has worked well. Remember that you should not copy. Being original and writing about unique content will allow us to better position ourselves in the different search engines.
5. Be updated on the latest trends and what is most in demand in our sector.
   

We tell you what are the main digital marketing tools that you can use to spy on your competition, without them knowing anything!

8 digital marketing tools to spy on your competition

For keyword searches and organic positioning

SemRush

It allows us to keep track of the keywords that are being used by our competition and what their positions are within Google. In addition, we can also see what keywords are getting better positions, for each of the pages of your website, which of them is bringing them more traffic, etc. If we enter the option "Advertising Research", we can also see what type of advertising they are doing and what texts they use to get new customers.

Ahrefs

With this SEO tool, we will be able to know which links point to our website, as well as how to obtain useful information about the evolution of our organic positioning strategies, that is, those in which paid advertising campaigns have no place. This research tool works to offer us exhaustive and reliable data on keywords, links, and content of our competitors. With it we can:

• Research multiple domains and URLs
• Research on the positions of those keywords, which our competition has.
• Identify the absence of content on other websites in our sector. This will give us the opportunity to create interesting content, which is not yet exploited, and attract our competitors' users to our website.
• Explore trends.
• Create keyword lists, for ads and content.
  

If you're still not sure whether to use it or not, you can pay $ 7 for a 7-day trial.

To search for pages and domains similar to yours

SimilarWeb

It is a tool that provides information on traffic sources, relevant content, mentions on social networks, etc. It is interesting to be able to compare websites similar to ours, within our market niche. We can also obtain data on other international competitors, from which we can obtain ideas to position ourselves better. There is a free version of the tool, which we can get by downloading the Chrome extension. However, the number of results per metric is minimal and limited.

Woorank

It is a tool for comparing web domains. Compare your website with that of your competition, providing data on the status of your site and offering recommendations on optimization. Analyzing our competition will help us to get to know them better, know what they are doing and what works for them. In addition, Woorank allows us to know how on point our business is with respect to our most direct competition, to be able to make decisions about which digital strategies are the best for us.

To monitor the content of your competitors

Google Alerts

A good way to start spying on our competition is to find out when they are mentioned on the Internet. Google Alerts is the best tool to help us in this regard. It is a free but very effective Google tool to search for mentions at the moment, daily, weekly, etc.

• Monitor or research our competitor's brands.
• Get specific information about products or product categories.
• Follow up on specific content of interest to our competition.
  

It is very easy to use. In it, we can specify how often we want to receive our alerts or where we want to search for mentions (news, blogs, web, etc). Once we have created our alert, it will be executed automatically, in this way, we can also save time.

To monitor your mentions on social networks

Social Mention

If we talk about social networks and their monitoring, we cannot fail to mention this tool. With it, we can:

• Write the brand of our competitors, the name of the product that interests us or the keyword that we want, and get a snapshot of everything.
• Collect data from various blogs, bookmarks, images, and videos.
  

We can sort our results by date or source and most importantly ... by the type of feeling it produces, that is, if the contents of our competition are accepted with pleasure and interest or on the contrary, with indifference on the part of the users. We can also see how many competitors have written on a particular topic.

BuzzSumo

If your competition is having success with the content they publish, that's where this tool comes in. With it, we can:

• Find the best performing content for a particular domain, in the last year.
• Finding new trends that are being talked about and writing about it.
• Obtain statistics from social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc.
  

This tool will help us identify what type of content works best for our competitors, to later publish related content with a higher level of optimization, which helps us to empathize with a new audience. Although we can use the tool for free, we will have to create an account to perform more than a certain number of searches.

To track your competition's prices

Minderest

It is a platform specialized in the monitoring and optimization of product prices. This tool tracks competitor prices and sends us alerts.

Conclusion

In the end, using one tool or another will depend on the data that we want to track and on which we want to focus. There are a thousand tools on the market, here we have only made a selection of those that work best and have the most performance. If we want a super simple monitoring tool, we recommend using Google alerts. If we want to focus on content marketing, betting on tools like Buzzsumo will be a success. If we want to do keyword research SemRush is the perfect tool. And for online advertising try Adtuo. 😉 And you, do you use any other?