Competitive Intelligence Tools for Internet Marketing – Internet Marketing 101

A common mistake among search engine marketers is a lack of competitive intelligence. If you’re not providing basic competitive intelligence analysis for your clients, you could be setting up an eventual failure of your campaign. Included on this page are suggestions of powerful competitive intelligence tools for you to review and consider utilizing to their highest potential.

Quantcast: Looks into sites’ demographics and target audience; a great tool to have in any internet marketer’s tool chest.
Xinu: Built off SEO Book and is cumulative; searches for domain information, header information and social bookmarking links that point back to a selected domain name, indexed pages, inbound links and much more.
SpyFu: Allows you to spy on the competitions’ PPC information. You can view how much they are spending, along with what words they are competing for and more.
KeywordSpy: Has many uses; from PPC competition to the SEO competition and your competitors’ ranking keywords. Also view the affiliate keywords and you can look back in time as well.
HitWise: Though a more expensive program, a large company with a high budget might find this tool extremely useful.
Trellian: Pricier than most, but less expensive than HitWise, Trellian utilizes exceptionally reliable competitive intelligence tools and services.
Adgooroo: Allows monitoring and tracking of your PPC competition.
Index Checker: A system that allows you to check how many pages are indexed on competitor sites.
KeyCompete: Pulls from many databases and crawls the engines to keep updated lists of keywords your competitors are bidding on.
Compete: An inexpensive tool at $2.00 a report; you can pull ranking reports and terms that are generating traffic from your competition from competes search analytics which is pulled from over 2,000,000 internet users and 6 search engines.
GoogSpy: A system to monitor competitions’ Adwords campaigns.
Microsoft Adlabs: Offers many features from keyword funnels to demographic estimations.
SEODigger: Provides accurate rankings for sites and links directly to the results; perfect for competitive intelligence.
SEOmoz: Offers many quality tools to help analyze competitor pages.
NicheBot: Finds niche keywords and top keywords for certain products and services.
Competition Dominator: A desktop application for monitoring your competitions’ PPC campaigns.
ToolPad: Competitive analysis tools for internet marketers.
Statsaholic: Provides stats across multiple free platforms.
InternetListed: Fastest and easiest tool for PageRank, Alexa Rank and more!
Ranking.com: Provides a list of the most popular websites; top websites are listed with rankings based on popularity and include traffic ranking details.
URLTrends.com: Tool to research trend history, rankings history, backlink history and more.
Tagurls: Web analytics tool combining the top 500,000 U.S. websites with topic tags, using data from del.icio.us and Quantcast.
Google Trends: Timeline of top trends and popular keywords.
Google Hot Trends: Popular trends and hot keywords by dates specified by you.
Google Zeitgeist: Provides quarterly in-depth data for popular searches.
Ask IQ: Lists monthly top ask.com searches.
Competitious: An easy, confidential way to discover and share competitive information collaboratively across your organization.