There’s a lot of pressure that comes with the idea of starting your own business. The brainstorming, uncertainties, fear, self-doubt, and every other emotion that comes with it can only be understood by someone who has gone through it. 

You just wanted to follow your passion, be your own boss or you just want that level of satisfaction and fulfillment of having to do it your way. You are not the first and will not be the last. If others can, so can you. The Nike way!

As hard as coming up with a business idea might be, running and actually staying in business can be even more challenging. Did you know that 50 percent of small enterprises fail in their first year and over 95 percent of small start-ups fail in the first five years?

But why?

Another often neglected reason why small businesses fail is deficient market intelligence. What this means is that you as a business owner need to understand what’s going on beyond the scope of your business. What’s going on with your customers, what do they want and what do they like, what are they saying about you and about your competitors?

Very importantly, you have to also understand the ways of your competitors. What are they doing right that you can model? Please do not copy else you lose your authenticity and uniqueness. What they are doing wrong could guide you into becoming the solution that the majority have always craved.

This process is what is termed  Competitive Intelligence.

It’s simple, it is way more convenient to run a path that has been walked on than it is to find your own way from scratch. Studying your competitors gives you a heads-up and prevents you from making unnecessary mistakes. But how do you go about it?

You could go conventional, have an informal interview with some of the employees of your competitors. Just that those who do not understand the concept might see you as desperate or they might be biased.

But if you want to act fast and smart, there are other methods that are more efficient which you can use. In this article, I’ll be unveiling to you, 7 free tools you can use to spy on your competitors legally with no law enforcement agencies on your trail. 

Here is the list of 7 free tools you can use to spy on your competitors with their unique benefits and features:

• SimilarWeb
• SEMrush
• BuzzSumo
• Facebook Ad Library
• Owler
• Alexa
• Spyfu

SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is your tool if you want to calculate or estimate the number of traffic generated by other websites, in other words, your competitors. This is a great tool for you to analyze the activities of your competitors.

What can SimilarWeb do for you?

The following are what you can do with SimilarWeb:

• SimilarWeb helps you to see your customer’s source of traffic.

• It helps you to check your competitor’s engagement metrics. What this means is that you get to see the total traffic their websites generate, average visit duration and so on.

• SimilarWeb helps you to see which social media platform is favouring your  competitors. This enables you to get the knowledge of which media will work best for you and which one your competitors are not really taking note of which you can tap into.

• It also enables you to see where your competitor’s visitors come from as well as show you which site they visit next. This can help you in choosing the right keywords that will drive traffic.

• With SimilarWeb you also get to see how and where your competitors’ visitors are mostly coming from. It could be direct, referrals, search, email, e.t.c.

• You can also check your competitor’s traffic by country.

With SimilarWeb, You Can Get all The Following For Free:

• Five results per metric
• One Month of Mobile App Data
• Three Months of Web Traffic Data

Semrush

What exactly does this tool do?

Semrush is an amazing tool, it’s safe to call it all-in-one because it offers you a wide range of benefits with its numerous features. Semrush is your go-to if you are looking to boost your online visibility, site audit, backlink source, rank tracking, keyword research (used by competitors) and so on.

Is Semrush Free?

This tool gives you access to any of their packages for free but your access lapses immediately after 7 day days upon your sign up. But really, with access to all their packages, 7 days is more than enough All you need to do is :

1. Type in your name
2. Type your company name
3. Select from the company size listed
4. Select your role, and you’re good to go.

Semrush Packages For Free

There’s the Pro and  Guru packages. What’s more?

Here’s What You Get With Your Pro in 7 Days:

• Access technical optimization insights
• Create 3 project
• Track as much as 500 keywords
• Analyze your Competitor’s strategies
• Research keywords
• Get up to ten SEO ideas and content templates 
• Conduct link building
• Manage social campaigns

Here’s What You Get For Your Guru Package in 7 Days:

• Get up to 15 projects
• Keyword limit is higher, 1500
• Historical data available
• Make branded PDF reports
• Track keyword positions across several locations and devices
• Crawl and audit 300,000 pages

Did you just say wow? Yeah, that’s what I thought. I bet you can’t wait to get your account setup. Just be sure to say thank you to the founders, Dmitry Melnikov and Oleg Shchegolev. Isn’t it amazing that all the features listed above can be gotten for free? 

BuzzSumo

According to BuzzSumo, you are just one click away from your competitor’s secrets and I totally agree. You know why? That’s because content is King in every area where it works. The secret of any successful business lies in the quality of the content and this is where BuzzSumo comes to play.

BuzzSumo will help you to analyze the content used by your competitors which is working for them.

What Does BuzzSumo Do?

BuzzSumo is an amazing tool with so many features you can take advantage of as long as your business is concerned. Below are some of the very numerous activities you can do with BuzzSumo:

• You can make comparisons of up to 10 competitor’s pages which will help you boost your strategy.

• BuzzSumo allows you to break down the activities of your competitor’s audience such as shares, likes, comments by post length and time posts are published. This will give you an insight into how your competitors run their pages.

• Understanding your customer’s emotions makes it easy to drive sales. BuzzSumo makes it possible for you to see the reactions mostly used by your competitor’s audiences. This way you get to know what makes their audience happy and what turns them off and you can use that to your advantage.

• BuzzSumo also helps you to generate loads of keywords which are based on what your audience searches for.

• It helps you to pinpoint the format that matches your audience’s personality.

• With BuzzSumo, you get access to trending topics in your business niche and you can create your content around those topics. You want to be the center of attention when it comes to creating content.

• If you can not go through the stress of creating your own content. BuzzSumo also helps you generate content ideas with real content. Absolutely cool right?

• That’s not all, you also get access to your competitor’s top content. You can then identify what works for them and what doesn’t.

• Get access to creators and authors who have gained authorities on social media platforms, scan and choose your favorite as influencers.

• Get alerted whenever your competitors are online.

Won’t you agree with me that this tool is extremely amazing?

You can also subscribe to their newsletter called the monthly buzz to get lots of free resources that will surely be of help to you and your business.

BuzzSumo’s Pricing Plans

Is BuzzSumo Free?

With BuzzSumo, you get a whole 30 days of spying. Below are the goodies you get absolutely free.

• 10 free searches a month
• One year of data with maximum of 1000 results
• One user
• No alerts
• No monthly export
• One content project
• One custom feed

 Features

• Content analysis report
• Domain report
• Influencer searches
• Backlinks
• Journalist’s profiles

BuzzSumo is an amazing tool I must say. Here is what some of their users have to say. 

You can also check out some of their frequently asked questions here.

Facebook Ad Library

Facebook Ad Library is a free tool which enables you to see the Ads that are currently running on both Facebook and Instagram.

This tool is of course owned by Facebook but you do not necessarily need a Facebook account to be able to use it.

What do you think it feels like to be able to see the Ads your competitors are running?

I bet you’re smiling already. That’s the feeling with Facebook Ad Library. All  your competitor’s  Ads secret is exposed to you and ready to be used to your advantage.

With Facebook Ad Library, you get to:

• Filter Ads: You can select Ads by impression. Select Ads with a specific date and all the most viewed Ads will be displayed.

• Evaluate Media Types: You get to see which media type is working well for your competitors.

• Examine Campaign Messages: This way you can easily get creative calls to actions and headlines.

• Ad Campaign Time: If you are confused about either when to start or stop your campaign, viewing existing Ads will give you an idea.

• See Current Trends: You also get access to what’s currently trending. That gives you an insight on what your audience are talking about and what they are likely to discuss in the future.

How Can You Begin To Use Facebook Ads Library?

To start using this tool, all you need to do is;

• Open Facebook Ad Library, this looks like a normal search engine

• Enter category then select all so you can view ads that are not politics related

• Enter the name of the company you want to view their Ads

• Tap on the page you’re searching for to get all the ads the company is currently running

• Click on “see ad details” to view the ad selected in detail and you’re good to go.

This tool is just amazing and best of all, it is absolutely free.

Owler

Owler is a tool that allows you to follow your competitor’s company. By so doing, you get to:

• Access the company’s exclusive data

• See and monitor what people are talking about as regards your brand

• Access information on industry news that is sure to boost your business growth

• Also find companies that would help boost your business with advanced search

• Receive daily news emails which is called daily snapshot for more than 15 event types

• Also opt in to get real-time news alerts also known as the instant insights, this enables you to get notifications whenever any company you chose is having a critical event

When talking about competitive intelligence, owler is one amazing tool to check out. You can:

• Track up to 5 companies
• See data on the companies
• See your top 3 competitors
• Get 5 advanced search results

You get all of these entirely for free. You should check it out. An unreliable tool will not have more than 3.5 million active users.

To sign up, enter your company’s name, enter your password and confirm it, agree to their privacy policy and terms of service and that’s it.

Alexa

Alexa is also one competitive analysis tool that you can use for free. There’s so much you can do with Alexa despite that it’s free.

What Does Alexa Do?

The following are the benefits you enjoy when you use Alexa:

• Track your website and also track your competitor’s websites to see their strengths and weaknesses.

• Get insights on those websites that are sharing the same audience with you.

• Find who your top competitors are.

• Get insights on your competitor’s audience.

• Get to know the keywords that drive traffic to your competitor’s websites.

• Find the topics your audiences are interested in.

• Find SEO keyword opportunities.

How Do You Use Alexa? 

To begin using this tool all you have to do is just type in the website you want to track and click on run analysis and you’ll get access to find similar sites, top sites, sites info and popular articles.

Spyfu

Spyfu was founded in April 2005 and it was formally called Googspy. This tool is used by digital marketers who want to improve their online search performances. Just like BuzzSumo, spyfu also reveals the business secrets of your competitors.

Is Spyfu Free?

 Spyfu free for life plan offers:

• 10 search results
• Personalized one on one strategy session
• Unlimited searches

Just as the name implies, it is totally free to use.

Why Use Spyfu?

With this tool, you are allowed to do the following:

• Research the SEO keywords used by your competitors so you can see what they rank.

• Get keywords from your competitors you haven’t already bought.

• Track your ranking progress.

• Track all websites in the same SEO niche as you.

• Target influencers that have links which will help you rank on specific keywords.

• Scan your account to see those keywords your competitors used but failed.

• Scan or browse your competitor’s ads history.

• Check out the backlinks you don’t have but your competitors have.

• Increase your website’s traffic, and many more.

Are these not enough reasons for you to start using this tool?

Find out more about Spyfu here.

Spyfu is easy to use plus they make available a lot of video tutorials to serve as a guide for you.

Conclusion

The world of business has gone far away from the time when non calculated trial and error was celebrated to the digital way of getting things done.

Creating a path of your own is great but threading an already made path makes your activities a lot more easier. That’s why in business you need to pay attention to those who are doing exactly what you are doing, especially those who have gained ground in your niche. They will definitely have their moment of failure and extreme success, study what makes each result possible and model what makes them successful adding your own bit of spice.

Lucky for you, you don’t have to go conventional about this as I have listed above, the top five tools for you to spy on your competitors without causing any harm.

Have you been using any of the listed tools?

Did your favorite tool make it to the list?

Share your experience and let’s connect more.