With today’s technology there is no excuse for being caught flat footed by a competitor’s big moves. The following list of sites and techniques will arm you with everything you need to stalk keep a close eye on your competitors every move.

Before you go all Austin Powers, take a second to think about who or what you should be spying on. A good technique is to head over to LinkedIn or Crunch Base and search for a rival company. Make a list of their important employees and their positions. I just recently read an article where a company was following around rivals key sales people and watching them check into locations on foursquare or Twitter (with geo location turned on). They would then use that data to determine which clients the competition’s sales people were talking to. Pretty sneaky indeed! You would be surprised how much info an employee might give out over Facebook or other social media channels.

Website Stalking

“I always feel like somebody’s watching meeeeee”.… Umm yeah, it’s ChangeDetection.com. These guys have been around since 1999 monitoring changes to webpages. For the low price of free you can be alerted to any changes your competition makes to their page. This sure beats obsessively checking their page 5 times a day but who does that anyway

Also, if you are already using Google Reader you can now subscribe to updates from pages that do not have RSS feeds. So it is very simple to keep tabs on important changes to webpages.

Use the Way Back Machine to look at changes to a website over time. What you are looking for is changes they made that have stuck around. If they kept the change it probably had a positive impact.

Social Media Stalking

Social Mention is a real-time social media search engine that also includes social media alerts that can be emailed to you daily for any search phrase. The search results display a ton of data including which social media sources are generating the most buzz. You can even drill down to see conversations from specific sites as well as the top usernames at those sites.

This is a great way to see which channels are working best for your competition or brands. You can also reach out to power users in the various networks you find. For good measure you can download all of this information to a csv/excel file!

The search results can be a little slow to load and I do not really trust the sentiment calculation they use but overall this is an amazing site to collect free information.

Topsy is a social media search engine with some great sorting options so you can see conversations by the hour, day, week and month. A really nice feature of Topsy is that you can search within a specific domain or a specific Twitter account etc. Example:  “site:domain.com” or you can do “site:domain.com from:TwitterUsername” and it will search for those specific Twitter conversations.

Addict-o-matic lets you instantly create your own custom “buzz” page around any topic. Each source they display has its own box that you can toggle off or on under the available sources menu. Bookmark the page and it remembers your settings. This is a great way to have the information you need, displayed in a clean and efficient manner.

How Sociable measures brand visibility across the web and assigns a score to each channel such as Facebook or Twitter etc. It is very simple to use and compare yourself to competitors to see which channels you need to improve in. You can also setup email alerts which is handy.

Check User Names is a great service but one sneaky way to use it is to enter in known usernames of your competitors and or their employees. The service quickly checks over 160 social networks to tell you if the name is available. Keep track of all the taken names and you can see where your completion is engaging on the web and where you can go to follow/friend them from an account they won’t suspect.

Google Stalking

As you know Google is a great source of information. Make sure you are getting the most out of it though. Using the new left menu updates, discussions, blogs, and news sections are really great for staying up on the latest information. Being able to sort by hours, days, weeks, and years is also a really nice way to filter out old information.

Example Search – [domainname.com -site:domainname.com] So that you show mentions of a site from external sources.  Or add (&as_qdr=d (past one day) to a query string to get searches in the past 24 hours.

I have read that people search for PDF files on competitors sties hoping to find something juicy but it is a harder one to get results on. Try something like (site:domain.com filetype:pdf “plan” OR “roadmap” OR “timeline” OR “strategy”)

Google Alerts is a very simple way to spy. Simply tell Google what you what to be update about and how often and it will email you whenever there is new information. You can also create an RSS feed with it as well.

I suggest putting quotes around your “keyword phrase”. Pretty much any search you can do on Google you can setup an alert for. So get creative.

Google Ad Planner will give you estimates of unique visitors, their interest, keywords searched and sites they also visited simply by typing in a competitors URL.

Google Insights & Google Trends are a great way to track brands over time.

You can input a URL into the Google Keyword Tool instead of a keyword phrase to see what keywords your competition focuses on.

Also, if you enable it you can use Google Analytics Benchmarks to compare your site to similar sites in your niche although the data is anonyms.

Stalking Demographic Data

It is always nice to get an idea of your competitor’s demographics as well as your own. Use the sites below to develop a profile of your competitions customers. You can learn their gender, age, race, education level and even salary ranges for free.

Quantcast
Compete Site Analytics
Alexa

Keyword Stalking

Before you start an SEO or PPC campaign you need to know what your competition is doing in both of these areas. The tools bellow will help you to see which keywords your competitor is running advertisements on Google and what keywords they rank for organically.

Keyword Spy

SpyFu

SEM Rush

iSpionage

These sites give limited data for free but offer a lot more for monthly subscriptions. They all really do the same thing so find the one with the best info for your niche and start spying.

SEO Stalking

The two best things you can and should be doing to stalk the competition is to go to Yahoo site explorer (download the csv file) and the Open Site explorer from SEOMOZ and to grab all of your competitors backlinks. Use this data to snipe links from that they have that don’t link to you. I recently mentioned how to do these in a previous article.

Honorable Mentions

Below are some sites that are really good but you should only focus on them after using the other services I mentioned.

Kurrently is a real-time search results from Twitter and Facebook. The conversation stream updates live which is really nice for following a trending topic. It also enables you to control the flow so you don’t get overwhelmed.

Besides having a killer domain name Twazzup is another real-time search service worth giving a look. You can follow a conversation stream and see how the top influencers are for that particular keyword. If you hover over a particular user it gives you their stats, location etc. without having to click on anything.

BackType is another good place to find conversations and influencers of a competitor’s domain.  In that past they had more functionality but they seem to have scaled back the free version of their service.

You can also, type a rival’s Twitter name into Klout and it will tell you who they influence and who influences them.

Ok by now I am sure you are itching to begin stalking. If you know of any great sites or techniques I didn’t cover be sure to leave a comment and if you if found the post helpful be sure to stalk follow us on Twitter @authoritydomain and RT.

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