One of the key strategies for an effective SEO campaign is competitor tracking. Knowing who is out ranking you and what they’re doing to achieve the results is the key to improving your performance.

Back in the old days, monitoring the 100’s of SEO variables of your competitors was just as time consuming as running your own SEO campaigns…

Now, thanks to technology and some very clever people, we have a range of tools that do the hard work for us.

To save you the effort of finding the right tools to spy on your competitors – I’ve listed my Top 10 competitor tools below (in no particular order). If you’re serious about SEO – you need to add these to your SEO arsenal.

Some are free, some offer free trials, some will charge nominal monthly fees – all are worth exploring.

• 1. Website Grader

Website Grader is a free seo 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. Visit site

• 2. Compete

Compete PRO Search Analytics bring search marketing into plain view with paid and natural search trends, historical search referral data, and customized filtering capabilities that let you focus on top performing keywords and traffic for thousands of websites. Visit site

• 3. Spyfu

Spyfu is a tool that lets you find out what keywords your competitors are targeting in the search engines. Not just keywords, mind you, but AdWords, too. All you have to do is type your competitor’s site in SpyFu’s search bar, and voila! Visit site

• 4. Yahoo! Site Explorer

Site Explorer allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. View the most popular pages from any site, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page. Visit site

• 5. Social Mention

Receive free daily email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, or on a competitors’ brand or pservices. Visit site

• 6. The Search Monitor

Track market share, page rank, ad copy, landing pages, budgets, day parts, and uncover new competitors on Paid & Organic Search. Visit site

• 7. SEMRush

SEMRush.com was designed to satisfy your needs in advanced SEM and keywords research. We analyze 40 million keywords for 20 million domains. Visit site

• 8. QuarkBase

Find out how good a site is. Get comprehensive website details. Discover competitors. See people, traffic data, similar sites, social comments, description, social popularity and much more about websites. View site

• 9. Linkscape

Linkscape provides link data never available before on over 64+ billion URLs across 259+ million domains. Regular crawls of the web means that Linkscape will keep up with your constant marketing efforts. Take the guesswork out of Internet marketing. Visit site

• 10. Xinu

Find out how well your site or your competitors are doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking services and other site statistics. Visit site

There are plenty more SEO and PPC competitor tracking tools out there, but these are my personal favourites. If you use a tool that you want to share with your fellow readers – drop us a note in the comments below.