Competitive intelligence is another important task internet marketers should take serious. Knowing what your competition is doing is helping you to make strategic decision. Something that works offline the same way it does online.

Online Marketers have an advantage over their offline pears. They can access information about their competitors marketing activities that can be worth a lot of money if used correctly.

Estimated spending for specific marketing campaigns, the campaign targets and the type of business optimization are information you can get in the offline world basically only by breaking several laws and risk prosecution and imprisonment.

The campaigns I am referring to are search marketing campaigns, one of the most important channels for an online business ranging from organic search engine optimization to paid pay-per-click search. This data is accessible in various levels of accuracy and detail on the internet and competitive intelligence analysts don't have to break any law to get those data.

There are a number of tools and services out there that help you with your competitor analysis. The provided data by any service or tool are always estimates and never exact figures. Some are more realistic than others and the general rule of thumb is to take any information with a grain of salt.

Using the data as absolute facts and exact figures and basis for important decisions is a mistake. Before you make important decisions, use alternative services to compare the data to and most importantly, inform yourself what sources were used by the services and tools you are using.

Well known completive intelligence tools and services and keyword research tools are services like Trellian's Competitive Intelligence, HitWise, Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, the Overture Bid and Keyword Tools and WordZe.

With exception of the overture tools are all tools and services available only to paid subscribers. Fees can range from $20-$50 up to thousands of dollars per month.

There is a free tool that offers almost as much as those well known paid services which was always flying below the radar and for that reason not as well known.

The name of the tool is SpyFu. SpyFu is the sequel to the popular and free tool GoogSpy and can be found at SpyFu.com. It is a service provided by VelocityScape. If you heart about GoogSpy, you will be amazed to hear the improvements that were made for SpyFu.

SpyFu offers free Website and Keyword analysis for organic and paid search. It has over 20 times the amount of data than its predecessor GoogSpy and tons of other new features.

You can approach the data from 3 sides and change the approach instantly because SpyFu provides cross links for any detail shown in its result pages.

1. Keyword or Key Phrase specific research and analysis

2. Website (Domain) specific data including top keywords and top competitors

3. Category specific data. The Tree-like navigation structure was taken from the DMoz directory

1. Keyword specific data

You can see information like average cost per click for the Keyword, Clicks/Day, Number of Advertisers, Cost/Day and Search Results in Google. Also sites that compete for the keyword in the organic and paid search results.

It also shows other Keywords targeted by the same sites that compete for the Keyword you are looking at and related keywords (works like any keyword suggestion tool).

2. Website specific data

See the top 10 terms for organic search and for paid advertisement. Estimated daily advertising budget, Total Clicks/Day, Avg. Cost/Click, Avg. Clicks/Day, Avg. Clicks/Day, Avg. Ad Competitors, Avg. Ad Percentile and SEO factors like Alexa Rank, number of Incoming Links and Avg. Load Time.

It also shows known sub-domains and even allows drilldowns to individual pages in some cases. You can see the top organic and top paid search competitors and the websites category/niche it was assigned to based on its ranking and advertising behavior.

3. Category specific data

It shows per Category additional Sub Categories, Related Search Terms and Related Domains.

This is a lot of data and unusual comprehensive for a free tool.

The only drawback of SpyFu is that the beta is not providing up-to date data. The Data on the free beta site is a few month old. Because of that fact should you only use it as a guide to get an overall idea what your competitors are doing and to get some keyword ideas you might want to explore further.

Use it in conjunction with other tools and services if you want to find out how accurate the provided numbers are.

This tool is a very cost effective resource that should not be missing in the book mark list of every serious internet marketer. For the big players out there might be the enterprise competitive intelligence solution by VelocityScape worth the time to take a closer look at.