They’re not going to be a secret anymore; they’re way too good to keep it as a secret. Dig in!
Colour & Font Snooper
I don’t know about you, but I love to have a good snoop around someone’s website. And if it’s one that I fall in love with, in terms of design, I want to emulate it. Let’s kick off with two gems you can use to find out the colours and fonts a web page is using.
ColorZilla
ColorZilla is my go-to when I want to know the exact colour a website is using. You’ll love using it to see how your competitors have put their colour palette together; in other words, to “steal” a colour. Don’t want to spend time clicking on parts of the page? Not to worry, just one click (two at most) and the Webpage Color Analyser will show you the entire colour palette of the page.
WhatFont
WhatFont is ColorZilla’s friend. Sure, you can mess around with inspector tools, but this nifty Chrome extension is way cooler. In one small, unobtrusive box, you get info about the font family and font size along with the line height and colour the site is using. Why would you want to know this? If you’ve ever explored the world of’Font Parings’ you’ll know what I’m talking about if you haven’t, you should.
SEO & Word Count Spying
When I do my spying, I like to stay on the page, so I don’t miss a thing. The following two spectacular spying tools help me do just that. There are many similar tools, but these are my stealth weapons of choice. Will they be yours?
SEO META in 1 CLICK
SEO META in 1 CLICK is a great tool for checking out how other people have set up their site. You can see basic SEO information clearly. The tool is precise, giving you a summary with just the right amount of detail. My favourite part is the headers tab; it shows the details of the H-tags and you can nosey around to discover if the web page has used the H1 to H6 tags correctly.
Word Count Tool
Word Count Tool tells you more than the number of words of one of your competitor’s post. It will give you a rundown of the number of sentences as well as average sentence length. But that’s not all. If you pop over to the website version and paste in the blog post you’re spying on, you’ll get a list of top keyword density. Now that’s not bad, is it?
Twitter Spying iOS Apps
Besides prying on the competition, use these apps to determine your next steps in your social media and content efforts. Will you try and pry?
Hashtag Spy
Hashtag Spy does what it says on the tin! Every hashtag used by any Twitter user is yours to study. You even get a CSV file!
Tweetroot
Tweetroot is similar to Hashtag Spy but prettier. Make a word cloud of a user’s tweets, hashtags and mentions. Spying never felt so colourful.
Dashbird
Dashbird wins hands down spying on your fellow Twitter users doesn’t get more in-depth than this tweety pie. Enter a competitor’s username and discover how they use Twitter. Top retweeters, top mentioners, keywords used, hashtags used—the list goes on!
Website & Facebook Spying
Let’s take a look at a few websites that will make you think you’re a double agent. Stealth mode to the max! The first two I call ‘My Website Helpers’. And I would be wrong and a most unhelpful spy if I didn’t share my number one tool for spying on Facebook pages.
Uprank
Uprank is my weapon of choice for sleuthing other people’s websites. I use it to compare myself to the competition. For example, at the time of writing, I need to up my keyword game. You can also use it to spy on the SEO experts. You know, the ones who are always mouthing off in Facebook groups saying how great they are. Then when you check out their site, you find out they aren’t. Seriously, you’ll become addicted to Uprank.
WP Theme Detector
WP Theme Detector is your go-to when you’re shopping for a new theme or wondering what plugins you could be using. Beyond a doubt, this is your swiss army knife of research when building or tweaking a website. Go on, run my site through WP Theme Detector to see what theme and plugins I’m using! Bonus: If the site doesn’t use WordPress, identify what CMS they use with: WhatCMS
LikeAlyzer
LikeAlyzer is my hero spying tool for Facebook pages. Among a gazillion other things, you’ll learn how a Facebook page is performing, what type of content they post, how often, and my favourite, whether they reply to comments. You’ll be a double agent using LikeAlyzer because you can also spy on your competitors’ competitors. Say what now? LikeAlyzer for the win.
