Are you competent or feel that something is missing in your Business Marketing framework? If so, here is whirlpool of info that will help you go ahead with better and better results. Businesses that understand their customer pain points, know their target audiences and buyer personas are undoubtedly already doing well in marketing business game. But there is still something amiss here! And that is to thoroughly investigate how your competition is doing and how they do it. You will be glad to know that you can actually investigate what your competitors are doing by Spying on them. It doesn’t cost anything, in fact gives you a clue of what you should be doing.

One way is to analyze your competitors’ website by searching their backlinks, email marketing funnels, and research the kind of paid and organic search keywords they focus on. Given below are some of the tools that will help you spy on your competitors:

• Sortd – If you are looking to check what is happening around you, it is presumed that you are doing best to stay on par with what is latest. But mind you, just a simple subscription to email marketing lists is not enough. You need to scatter your glances just everywhere you can think of. Subscribe to all email lists that includes cheat sheets, free ebooks, challenges and training. Study your competitors email sequences and cross-references that you are already doing. Evaluate every aspect of the product you like by checking on the material, quality, any weak points that you can improve on.
  The only demerit of this is that it may quickly fill up your inbox, you can use tools like Sortd that will help you streamline new subscriptions and alerts and also helpful in organizing to-do lists and follow-ups.
• SEMRush – This is a very special tool that helps you research the keyword your competitors are already using. This tool helps you spy on your competitors’ blog posts, websites and ad keywords that help you study the best ones that are giving results. Choose the best one that will show you effective results for your company. SEMRush helps you find the keyword that is generating huge traffic. Scanning through all this information will help you craft the type of content that you need to write and target the markets.
• Social Media – Social Media is the best tool that helps to see what your competition is up to. But there is something deeper than meets the eye and the layman users would not know about it. Scroll through the Twitter Feeds and Facebook pages, social mention uses the keywords that you may be looking for and it shows you the conversation that is going on in Social media and the way trends are moving.
• Quick Sprout – The Competitor analysis tool from Quick Sprout helps to figure out the websites that are similar to yours. The information will help you to shape your strategy and the means to outreach them in search engine results. The tool also helps to gain insight on estimated traffic scores, SEO scores and Social Network Shares that show which businesses are and could be your competition.

Along with what is stated above, pay attention to speed scores. Almost 47% of users need faster load time of 2 seconds or less. 40% of users will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. You need to really gear up if competitor’s website is running faster than yours.

• Monitor Backlinks – The tool helps to check the links with your competitors. It helps to enhance your SEO thereby improving the search reach. Monitor Backlinks is a tool that helps to check the quality links that your competitor gets. This will give you the clue of which businesses would backlink your business or have an interest in your products or services. It is one of the best tools while conducting competitive link analysis.

Monitor Backlinks gives alerts when backlinks are posted to your own site, this is the best means to actively engage with the blogger, build relationships and share the content. You can also check if the backlinks are removed so that you can keep pace with ongoing changes in your marketing efforts.

• Import.io – Data mining is one of the best means to get information on multiple things. Import.io is an important tool that is helpful in extracting the data from webpages and use the information for lead generation, price monitoring and market research. The benefit here is that you can extract and process the data from multiple URLs at the same time that will give you bigger picture idea of the competition.
• Similar Web – Similar Web is the tool that helps to get a glimpse on the online marketing strategies that are being followed by your competitors. The Similar Web dashboard gives a view on referring sites, display advertising, search the traffic. The information will give you a better view of competitor’s monthly traffic estimates and the engagement, the tool helps to keep a track on organic and paid traffic.
• LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a professional platform and can provide infinite information on competition businesses. Make use of follow-up feature that helps to keep tabs on competition and the postings that they do. The LinkedIn Pulse helps to find out information where they are blogging and information about their products or services. You can find all the information here that could benefit you.