Are you struggling to keep up with the fierce competition? Do you wonder if your competitors know something that you don’t? Are you trying to achieve a high success rate? Well, this is no longer a pressing issue now. You simply have to look and learn from your rivals to gain insights into their strategies. How? Competitor Analysis Tools that track, analyze, monitor, and help you learn from the strategies of your competitors. You can see their backlinks, keywords, advertising campaigns, and use all this information to create a powerful marketing strategy for your brand.
Needless to say that this will provide you with a hue edge and you can win BIG. Plus, you can save a lot of time and invest it in your own marketing efforts. These tools are a great source of innovation, ideas, and motivation. Yes, there are hundreds of software available for this purpose, and choosing the best one among them can be tricky. Also, you might not know what will work for you or can be a pain.
Taking care of all your worries, we have listed the 6 best competitor analysis tools based on their features, effectiveness, and results. Take a look at these options and then decide for yourself.
SEMrush
Be it a small business or a large enterprise, any company that has a website needs to know what its competitors are doing. To find that, the best way is SEMrush, unarguably one of the best competitor analysis tools in the market. It is an all-in-one digital marketing suite that you can use for competitive analysis, PR, SEO, PPC, keyword research, social media, content, and whatnot. To compete for Google search engine rankings, you can make the best of this solution to find top-ranking keywords that your peers are using, ones they are bidding on, and their advertisers to stay ahead of the competition and steal more customers. SEMrush currently offers 30 tools and you can build your toolkit by selecting the ones that make the most sense for your project. There are exclusive kits for SEO, social media, advertising, content marketing, and competitive research. It also boasts its ability to analyze over 3.7 billion keywords and 4 trillion backlinks.
Also Read: Top 10 SEO ranking checker Tools for tracking your website
We all know that SEO is an integral part of marketing efforts as the quality of a website and its performance decide its visibility on search engines. SEMrush is a trusted tool to screen the SEO performance of competitors, thanks to its amazing features, such as SERP analysis, organic traffic estimator, and competitive ranking tracker. You can use the software to drive traffic and generate leads for your business.
You can use SEMrush to:
- Find organic keywords
- Know competitors’ best keywords
- Access traffic
- Find backlinks they acquire
- Monitor increases and decreases in rankings
- Enhance advertisement campaign
- Find new competitors in Bing ads and AdWords
- Understand keyword trends and traffic source
- Find best-performing sites
- Monitor business growth
SEMRush offers three pricing plans- Pro, Guru, and Business. Sign up for a 14-day trial to check which one works best for you.
Price: Starts from $119.95 to $199.99 per month and a yearly subscription, depending on the plan you select.
Ahrefs
To gain an advantage over your competitors, you need to know why they rank higher on search engines and what you can do to outrank them. That is where Ahrefs comes into the picture, allowing you to find the exact keywords that other companies are ranking for in organic search results and understand the traffic it brings them. Being a popular research tool in the market, it finds backlinks that most software can’t hence, preferred by many SEO professionals in their toolkit. The Top Pages report highlights all the pages that send the most traffic to websites and the Content Gap feature uncovers those keywords that you are not ranking for but your competitors. This is a reliable way to get a clear understanding of the content that others are posting and works for them while analyzing what you are missing.
Ahrefs provides in-depth keyword research, giving an estimate of the competition level and volume for each keyword. It develops relevant keywords and backlink data from a 24-hour robot crawling around 4 billion pages every 15 minutes. You also get other forms of reports using the site explorer tool thereby, getting the best of the best.
Ahrefs includes a range of features, such as:
- Backlink audit to get the required data for your existing link profile
- Track individual keywords
- Find link prospects that monitor competitors’ links
- Track organic visibility
- Validate keywords and analyze competitors
- Brand management to set up alerts for keywords, an important tool for relationship building and brand management
- Keyword research and find content ideas
- Web monitoring
Price: Monthly Subscription ranges from $99 to $999.
Brand24
One area in which almost all businesses are competing these days is online presence across different platforms. It can be in various forms, including a number of mentions online, sentiments around the business, its services, products, etc., social media reach of content, the share of voice in the industry, audience engagement, influencers talking about the brand, customer feedback, and more. In this context, Brand24 is an exceptional competitor analysis tool that comes in handy to analyze the digital presence. This online monitoring software is widely used to track social media and web mentions of predefined keywords that are relevant to your brand and competitors. Also, it makes it possible to manage and listen to countless conversations that happen on different portals daily by tracking the right set of keywords across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc.
Brand24 is known for its excellent analytics that you can use to get insights and boost marketing strategies and branding. Moreover, it offers extensive analytics to put this collected data into perspective. You can start tracking the company name, service/product name, hashtags, name of the marketing campaign, CEO’s name, and any other relevant keywords.
Using Brand24 for competitor analysis, you can track:
- What their customers are talking about them, their products or services
- Any influential sources that mentioned them
- Their customer requests or complaints
- Their products plus points and drawbacks
- If they are getting a lot of negative or positive feedback
- The latest improvement they have introduced
- Their social media reach and mentions
- Sources that mention them frequently
- User engagement level
Price: Ranges from $49 – $249/month
Spyfu
One common way to acquire search engine traffic is GoogleAds where you buy exposure for your brand. Like organic traffic, here also competition is based on keywords and you pay for displaying your advertisement in the top search results. Spyfu is a search analytics tool that gives you a complete rundown of your competitors’ digital marketing campaigns. You can use the tool to get insights into their paid traffic and track rankings for paid keywords over time. Use the software to download your competitors’ most profitable keywords and ads so that you have everything from the list of purchased keywords for AdWords to details of their keyword strategy at your fingertips. Use the research tool for a deep and broad look at all the keywords that websites in your niche are targeting.
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Spyfu was originally named GoogSpy, designed to identify keywords that competitors have bought and ads they run. The platform also reveals content and backlinks that are generating this traffic and their keyword ranking history too. The software gathers this data through web scraping and upgrades it on a monthly basis. Therefore, you get a complete overview of everything that’s happening with larger trends in SEO and SEM rather than just a real-time tracking engine. Use this report to understand your competition better and stay ahead of the trends by creating the most relevant content. You also get to see how their ads have evolved so you can work on your campaigns more effectively.
Spyfu offers assistance to:
- Recognize threats
- Finding the most important keywords for your market
- Start an AdWords campaign from scratch
- See keyword group suggestions
- Move your site up the page for specific keywords
- Plan a content marketing campaign
- Sort keywords based on cost per click to discover quick wins
- Create new PPC campaigns
- Improve your SEO strategy
Price: Ranges from $33 – $58/month
Buzzsumo
If you are looking for a trusted partner to streamline content marketing, then Buzzsumo is the right choice for you. It is your go-to tool when it comes to analyzing competitors in content and social media share. Along with handling PR, content, and influencer marketing, it also helps you discover the performance of competitors’ social share, including the networks, comparison between your content and theirs, and people who are sharing their content. Hence, you can develop an actionable and effective content strategy that aligns with your business.
Like other competitor analysis software, Buzzsumo also tracks the most shared content across social networks, keeps an eye on your peers, finds the types of content that generate more shares and engagement, and whatnot. However, it goes one step further by letting you compare your targeted keyword performance with your competitors. You can search either using content niche or URL to know who has created the most popular content on a particular topic. Buzzsumo also enables you to set up Competitor Content Alerts to get content alerts whenever anything is published by your competitors. The software also provides a detailed report for content performance to show the areas where others are gaining success and analyze average share by format, network, content length, and day published.
Buzzsumo includes the following features:
- Tracking most popular and shared content on social networks
- Increase brand awareness
- Detailed competitor content performance reports
- Media monitoring tool as you get notified every time a competitor is mentioned online
- Find the types of content that gained the most social shares
Price: Upgrade the free plan for $99/month
Siteliner
We definitely cannot complete our list of the best competitor analysis tools without mentioning Siteliner, which is known for a more technical insight into the performance of your competitors’ business or website. Although it was mainly designed for businesses to use on their own websites, this doesn’t restrict you to use it to find broken links, duplicate content, and more on your competitors’ sites. The platform is used in a more technical and tactical way, which often influences a website’s ranking. You can also use Siteliner to gain a backlink from trusted and good-quality websites and also find your broken links on any authoritative site, so you can suggest them to provide a link to your content.
Also Read: Best Website Builder for Online Stores to look out in 2021
Siteliner is also a reliable platform to discover weaknesses in your website performance and your competitors’. Also, you can come up with relevant topics for your future content. With such data available, you can suggest a replacement link, which hugely influences browser rankings.
Using Siteliner, you can find:
- average load speed
- Broken links on an authoritative website
- Duplicate content
- The average number of words per page
- Number of words per page
Price: Free version offers monthly analyses of websites having up to 250 pages.
Wrapping Up
To stay on top of the game, you need to keep a close watch on your competitors. Learn from their mistakes and achievements. However, you need the right competitor analysis tool for this that provides you with the required data about your rivals. Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. You need to choose the software that meets your needs and makes the process easier for you. So, be meticulous, take your time, and then make an informed decision.