Other methods to find your online competitors

Our competition research would not be complete without using some very powerful competition spying tools.
Here is the list of competitor spying tools we have been using regularly:

• Find related sites using Google's related command. The search engines know better than anyone what the most closely related websites are in a specific keyword genre. Type the "related" command into Google like this: related:www.yoursite.com. This command will return a list of pages that Google thinks are related to your site. Now try the command with a competitor's site, as you can see there are endless possibilities to find as many related sites as possible.
• Use Google's "define" search command. If you want Google to tell you which sites are considered an "authority" on specific keyword phrases, simply enter this command: define:keyword. Google will show you all the websites that are considered valuable resources on those subject matters. Try to enter some of your own keywords to see which sites come up in the search results. You may notice by clicking through some of the results that most of the pages are glossary of term type of pages. This is something to keep in mind for later when building content for your website. Adding a glossary page containing your industry specific keyword terms and their definitions is a great idea.
• Spyfu is a free research tool for discovering the keywords and ads your competitors are using on Google. You can enter a keyword phrase or a competitor's domain to gain access to their target keywords, current organic ranking, related keyword phrases, and other Adwords advertisers bidding on the same keywords. You have to keep in mind the Spyfu tool is very experimental; nonetheless, a great way to get some estimate of the total number of clicks your competitors are receiving and their average ad position.
• Google Alerts will send you email alerts based on your keywords. Every time there is some new development related to your specified keyword phrases on Google search, blog, news, or groups, it will send you an email alert. The keywords you specify can include your own website URL or your competitors web address. This is a great way to find out what's being said about you and your competitors.