What your competitors are doing online (and how to find out for free)

THIS WEEK: Knowing what your competitors are up to used to require either a lot of money or a lot of manual digging. This week we look at three free tools that together give you a genuinely useful picture of what your competitors are ranking for, where their traffic comes from, and when they make a move worth paying attention to.

Most small business owners do competitive research in the least efficient way possible. They Google their competitors occasionally, scroll through their website, maybe look at their Instagram. They get a vague sense of what the competition is doing without any actual data. It is the digital equivalent of looking out the window to check the weather instead of opening a weather app.

Proper competitive intelligence tells you which keywords your competitors are ranking for that you are not, where their website traffic is coming from, whether they are running Google ads and what those ads say, and when they publish new content or get mentioned in the press. That information lets you make actual decisions: which keywords to target, which marketing channels to invest in, which gaps in the market you can move into.

The tools that do this properly, SimilarWeb's paid plans, SpyFu Professional, dedicated brand monitoring platforms, cost anywhere from £40 to several hundred pounds a month. The free versions of those same tools, plus one tool that has always been free, cover most of what a small business owner genuinely needs. Here is how to use them.

TOOL 1: SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb (free version) tells you where your competitors get their traffic from. You type in any competitor's website and it shows you an estimate of their monthly visits, how long people spend on the site, which countries their traffic comes from, and crucially, what the split is between direct traffic, organic search, paid search, social media, referrals, and email. For small businesses this is genuinely useful. If you can see that your main competitor gets most of their traffic from organic search rather than paid ads, that tells you something about where they are investing. If a competitor's referral traffic is significant, you can dig into which sites are sending them visitors and consider whether those same sites might send you traffic too.

The free plan on SimilarWeb has no time limit and shows basic traffic data for any website. The limitations are real: historical data is restricted, data for smaller sites can be less accurate (traffic estimates for sites under 100,000 monthly visits can be significantly off), and deeper analysis requires a paid plan that starts at $149 a month. For a quick read on a competitor's traffic sources and rough size, the free version is enough.

Link: https://similarweb.com

TOOL 2: SpyFu (free version) tells you which keywords your competitors rank for in Google, and whether they are running paid ads. You type in a competitor's domain and it shows you their top organic keywords, their top paid keywords if they are running Google Ads, how much they are estimated to spend on paid search, and how their rankings have changed over time. SpyFu has been collecting this data for over fifteen years, so the historical view is particularly useful: you can see which keywords a competitor has been consistently ranking for versus which ones are new, which gives you a better sense of where their SEO effort is actually focused.

There is no time limit on the free version and no credit card required. You do get limited results per search compared to the paid plans, which start at $39 a month. For checking a competitor's keyword footprint and seeing whether they are running ads, the free tier does the job.

Link: https://spyfu.com

TOOL 3: Google Alerts (completely free, no account needed beyond Gmail) tells you when your competitors are mentioned online. Set up an alert for a competitor's brand name and you get an email whenever Google indexes new content mentioning them: press coverage, blog posts, forum mentions, new pages on their own site. You can set the frequency to immediate, daily, or weekly, and filter by source type if you only want news results rather than everything. It is not sophisticated. It does not monitor social media. It will not catch everything. But it costs nothing, takes five minutes to set up, and means you are no longer completely in the dark when a competitor does something worth knowing about. Set one up for your own brand name too while you are there.

Link: https://google.com/alerts

Take your main competitor. Spend fifteen minutes in SimilarWeb looking at their traffic overview. Note their top traffic sources and whether organic search or paid search appears to be their primary channel. If they are getting significant organic traffic, that tells you SEO is working in your market and worth investing in. If paid search dominates, they are spending money on ads and probably making it back.

Spend fifteen minutes in SpyFu typing in their domain. Export or note down their top ten organic keywords. Are there keywords on that list that you are not targeting? Those are your gaps. If they are also running Google Ads, look at which keywords they are bidding on. Companies do not continue bidding on keywords that do not convert. If they have been bidding on the same keyword for months, it is probably profitable for them, which means it is worth you considering whether organic rankings for that term could bring you the same traffic for free.

Set up Google Alerts for their brand name. Takes two minutes. Set it to once a day so it does not clutter your inbox.

You now know roughly how much traffic they get and from where, which keywords they are targeting, and you will be notified when they make a move that gets picked up online. That is more competitive intelligence than most small businesses gather in a year, and it took an hour.

NEED HELP? In over your head? Wearing too many hats already? No idea where to start? I can help you.

Wappalyzer (wappalyzer.com) is a free browser extension that tells you what technology a website is built on. Hover over any competitor's site and it shows you their CMS, email marketing tool, CRM, analytics platform, hosting provider, and any other tech it can detect. Knowing that a competitor uses a particular email marketing platform or CRM can tell you something about their level of sophistication and budget.

Facebook Ad Library (facebook.com/ads/library) is completely free and shows you every active ad any Facebook page is running, including your competitors. No account required. Search for a competitor's page and you can see exactly what they are running right now: the copy, the creative, how long the ad has been running. Ads that have been running for a long time are almost certainly working. This is the closest thing to reading your competitor's marketing playbook.

Competitive intelligence sounds like something only large businesses with dedicated marketing teams bother with. In practice, most small business owners ignore it entirely, which is a mistake when the information is this accessible and this cheap to gather.

The tools above will not tell you everything. SimilarWeb's free tier data for smaller sites is an estimate, not a fact. SpyFu's keyword data is historical rather than real-time. Google Alerts misses social media entirely and does not catch every mention. None of them replace a proper market analysis done by someone who knows what they are doing.

But they will tell you considerably more than you know now. And in most local and niche markets, that puts you ahead of the majority of your competitors, who are not doing this at all. The bar for competitive intelligence among small businesses is remarkably low. You do not need to clear it by much to be the best-informed business in your space.

Got a tool you want me to review? Reply to this email. Need actual help with your business's systems or digital setup? I have been doing this for 17 years. Get in touch.