Monitoring your competitors is both a science and an art.

Here are a few tools that help you monitor competitors.

Some of them are absolutely free but offer great service and functionality.

Google Alerts

It’s a free online tool from Google that emails you happenings, mentions and news surrounding the topics you earmarked.

Google’s a search engine behemoth and if it has an alerts service rest assured that its spiders will crawl and pick through every nook and cranny to send you reports on whatever it is that captures your attention including precisely what your competitors are up to.

And all of this without lifting a finger.

This helps you get their latest backlinks and mentions throughout the web.

Topsy

Topsy is another crowd favorite that can be tweaked for competitor research.

Topsy is a Twitter miner and research tool.

You can dig through your competitor’s tweets for years even back up to 2006.

You can see the entire list of tweets and the number of tweets they sent.

Along with that you can monitor which influencers are tweeting their content.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs began primarily as a backlinks checking and analysis tool.

Compared to everything that was on the market at the time and even now, Ahrefs seems to be the most comprehensive backlink checker.

I’ve checked several of my sites on the tool and every time I’m surprised to find the accuracy in finding links.

The only ones it doesn’t seem to be find are ones that aren’t big on traffic or nascent sites.

But now the tool has morphed itself into a content analyser, keyword researcher, broken link tool checker and scores of other functionalities that could take 11,000 words to broach.

It’s a paid tool and worth every penny.

SEOBook Tools

It’s suite of competitor research tools.

You can place the tool on your site and gather quick information on every metric that matters.

BuiltWith

It’s a free tool that analyses what technology powers a particular site.

A site might use scores of different plugins and background technology to siphon data.

There could be trackers and analytics tools all over the place.

BuiltWith presents a bird’s eye view of all tools and plugins that powers a site and gives you a total list.

SimilarWeb

I use SimilarWeb primarily to understand how much traffic my competitor gets and I think it hits the ballpark really well most of the times.

I would suggest you to sign up for an account rather than using the site on whims.

An account gives much more comprehensive presentation of all data factors.

You can see a referral report, keywords that bring most traffic and number of visits and unique visitors the site averages per 3 months and on a monthly basis too.

Concluding thoughts

So what do you think of our list of tools to measure and track competitors?

DO let us know in the comments below.