There are many reasons why you may want to spy on your startup competitors. For one, you want to see how your startup’s services or product compares to your competitors, all of whom are competing for that precious VC money.
Obviously, spying shouldn’t replace your own in-house creative process, but it can definitely spark ideas and keep you in check.
Tools for Analyzing & Spying on your Startup Website Competition:
Below are the best tools for analyzing and spying on your competitors within the startup space:
SimilarWeb: Digital Marketing Intelligence and Web Traffic Analysis
Can you afford to ignore your competition? If not, Similar Web could prove to be your best friend.
It does a great job in providing competitive insights about a website that can help you stay ahead of the curve. Think of it as a microscope that can provide you a laser-like view into your competitor’s overall digital presence without letting them know about it.
The vast amount of information that you get is pretty impressive, to say the least. It provides traffic sources, it pulls out PPC keywords, traffic percentage for each keyword, leading traffic locations, competitor’s media placement, apps owned by the competition, and so much more. You can instantly compare your data against your top competitors to improve your standing down the road.
Backlink Spy: Competitor Keyword Research Tool for PPC
and SEO
Backlink Spy from Spyfu will tell you why your competition is doing so well. It will provide you all kinds of competitive data so that you can shake their world in the near future.
In other words, it gives you the most mileage on your backlink research work, so that you can compare your site with your competitors to be at their throat in record time. By spying your competitor’s backlink profile right under their noses, you can adopt an effective backlink strategy to gain more attention to your site.
The data obtained from Backlink Spy about the visitors and traffic activity will help you make better decisions for your website. Their plan starts at $50/month. All plans are backed by 30-day money back guarantee.
Rapportive: Show LinkedIn Emails and Profiles in Your Gmail
Rapportive is a free browser extension tool that automatically pulls out Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profile of people who send you an email.
Basically, it shows various social media profiles of your contacts on the right-hand panel inside the inbox. By getting more information about the user, one can easily follow them. It’s a great way to establish rapport to grow one’s network by connecting with people on popular social media platforms.
Perhaps, there is no better way to get a wealth of information from your Gmail account. It works with most of the popular browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Mailplane, and Safari.
Wappalyzer: Identify Technology on Websites
If you ever looked at a stunning website and wished you knew everything about how the site was put together, you need to take a look at Wappalyzer. It’s a popular browser extension that unveils the technology behind the site. It displays the framework and other commercial things about a site.
It shows everything from frontend to backend such as web servers, analytic tools, e-commerce platforms, content management and so on.
Basically, you will know what’s going behind the scenes. All it takes is a few clicks to get top-level information about a site. The best part is that it’s a free browser extension that works on Chrome as well as Firefox.
Discoverly: Get Information from Social Networks as You Browse the Web
Want to be more productive personally and professionally without extra efforts? Discoverly can help you over here. Discoverly shows the complete social profile of your email contacts.
For instance, you will see Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other social profiles of your email contacts on the sidebar through this plugin. It will also show a list of mutual friends and a quick way to view latest tweets.
Basically, it supercharges one’s ability to know more about people. The goal is to leverage this information for successful networking. If we were to steal words from the founder’s mouth, he says. “We save time by showing users the needles in the haystack in one place.”