Action is the real measure of intelligence. – Napoleon Hill
You should only spy when you really need to. If you’re just testing out a niche or it’s not that important, a quick look at SpyFu is all you need. If you dig deeply into unneeded areas, you will run into dead ends or wind up finding a lot of useless information. There are no rewards for wasted time you could have spent working on your own website.
Save the real spy work for when you have a competitor who is just KILLING IT with SEO and you can’t figure out how to beat them. Only then, use these strategies to find out things about your competitors that will be useful in your planning, and uncovering things like which networks and forums they belong to. Sometimes they will announce their strategies and tests thinking the competitors can’t find them… but you are watching.
Finding Anonymous
Finding out who the owner is behind a website can be a challenge with a private whois, but it’s not impossible. A private whois today may not have been private four years ago. Use DomainTools whois history to see if it has always been private.
Red means it is private and won’t help you trace much except for when an IP address or server changes (often highlighted in gray). Blue is an open door unless the website was sold. Check all the blue links to see if extra information is given or changed. Still, you can contact this owner and may be able to find out who the site was sold to.
Entirely private does not mean you have a dead end. You can use reverse IP tools to see other sites on the same server. You might be able to find feeders on the same server. If your competitors were too cheap to mark those other domains private you can trace them that way. Bing’s IP: tool is fantastic for this.
You can also do a reverse email search without paying extra for it. Just use Google, site:domaintools.com “emailaddress” or “address” to find what you can. Sometimes people use company names or different phone numbers, so switch it up. You should be able to find more if it’s public though.
From there you can also trace AdSense IDs and more. The free Spy Rush tool can help with this. A big plus is that it can also search Google Analytics IDs. Most affiliates are smart enough to cover their trail on that end, but they still leave the door open for NetComber to find them. It’s a paid service but pretty awesome.
Data Mining
Start building a file of every piece of information you collect. That means the address, email, phone, company name, all other domains, spouse’s name, past addresses, company phone, Twitter, and whatever else you can get. Google each piece of information. Add “SEO” or “Forum” to each query the second time around. Chances are you will find other sites or niches they are involved with, their interests, and if you’re lucky, their accounts on internet marketing forums. Keep track of the usernames on totally unrelated forums.
Alter your queries, too. If you have an address that says “St.” change it to “street” and see if you get different results. Check out all of their company information on CorporationWiki.com if they list it to see what else they are involved with. Sometimes you will find their partners.
In your file, mark when they moved around to different niches, when companies changed, etc. For example, we had a savvy competitor that had trouble with his sitemap.xml file in December 2011 even though he was ranking well. How did we know this? He posted the question on a forum. From there, we could also search his question in the timeframe (use custom range for dates on Google) to find other forums where he asked the same question and gather all of his usernames.
You can automate this a bit too. Just watch this video from the RCS king Wil Reynolds. He explains how to do it with website technology:
If you can’t use LinkResearchTools.com Link Alerts, then sign up for a free account at Ahrefs Site Explorer and monitor your biggest competitor daily to see what links they gain and drop. If you notice a change or a pattern, make note of it. Often you will see the competitor buy links for multiple sites in his network from the same place. Keep following up and you will eventually find where they hide online. Check back frequently to see if new domains or opportunities come up.
A few more tips…
Finding out what conferences they go to can be huge. You might find their link partner just by a connection on LinkedIn in their local area or where they traveled and had pictures tagged on Facebook for everyone to see. We’ve found an incredible link partner doing this exact process.
Action
Most importantly, take action on the information you find. Stalking is just creepy. Competitive analysis is fun and profitable.