Have you ever wished you were Bond? James Bond?  Here are 007+007 = fourteen ways to spy on your competitors’ web sites, without breaking any FISA laws.

1. Statbrain – Using several sources, Statbrain’s algorithm computes the number of visitors to a website based on offsite factors like backlinks, Alexa Rank etc. Statbrain does not have access to log files or any hit-counter information. Use this as a rough relative benchmark of your traffic to theirs. First run your website and compare the results given by StatBrain to your actual results to get a sense of its accuracy in your category. Figure out what the multiplier is and then try it on a competitor.

2. AideRSS – Find out which of your competitors’ blog posts and topics are engaging people. This should provide you with a list of topics you should be covering. Engagement doesn’t necessarily mean your competitor’s opinion is right or even agreed with — but it does mean the engaged people are interested in the topic and therefore why not your opinion on the topic.

3. FeedCompare – If you use Feedburner to track your rss subscribers you can compare the size of your feed to others. Just like in #1 above, figure out your own multiplier and then compare it to the competition.

4. Xinu Returns – Xinu Runs a report from multiple sites to tell you how well a site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking sites and other technical details. How well are you stacking up against your 5 biggest competitors?

5. Google Trends For Websites – Enter up to five topics and see how often those topics been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most. You can learn more on how to use this from our friend, Avinash Kaushik.

6. Google Insights for Search – With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames. Again, Avinash explains how to use this well.

7. Microsoft’s Keyword Forecast tool – This tool forecasts the impression count and predicts demographic distributions of keywords.

8. Microsoft’s Search Funnels – Customers often perform searches by typing related keywords in specific sequences. This tool helps in visualizing and analyzing the customers’ search sequences. Search Engine guru Mike Grehan explains the value of these query chains.

9. WayBackMachine – Go back in web history to see how your competitors’ site has changed through the years. Look for the things that have stayed consistent, because those might have been the most successful. In the same vein, what have you changed on your own site during that time? It’s easy to lose track, particularly of your own work, and to think of your current site as “how it’s always been”.

10. Web Page Speed Analyzer – Compare the download speed of your pages with those of your competitors to see which are loading quicker. Quicker loading pages tend to have an advantage at converting visitors. This analyzer provides a detail analysis of the page elements. For a rough comparison of two pages side by side try WebSlug. And, WebWait is great when you want to get accurate speed results from the visitors perspective because WebWait pulls down the entire website into your browser, so it takes into account Ajax/Javascript processing and image loading which other tools ignore.

11. Web Page Readability – By comparing the readability score of web pages you can optimize your writing and make sure that you aren’t creating overly complex sentences and paragraphs for your audience.

12. Attention Meter – Attentionmeter gives you a quick snapshot comparing any websites you want (traffic) using Alexa, Compete, and Quancast.

13. Websitegrader – Website Grader is a free tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective. Also worth checking out Twittergrader to check on your competitors’ twitter accounts.

14. Google Alerts – set up searches for your competitors, key employees, and keywords to monitor their activity.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it: Try some (or all) of the above techniques and report back on your intriguing espionage! This tape will self-destruct in 10 clicks.

Shhhhh… care to share your spying secrets? What tools or techniques do you use? Now It’s YOUR Turn! What are your thoughts? Post below, I’d love to know what you think!