An SEO competitor analysis will help you to spot the weaknesses and strengths of your competition. SEMrush is a valuable tool to see what keywords your competitors rank for, where they buy traffic from and also their backlink profiles. This infographic outlines how to use this valuable piece of software and other valuable tools including SpyFu and Ubersuggest for valuable competitor research.
HEre are the best seo competitor tools in town.
Google Trends
Find when and where your competitor is being mentioned on the web in real time using Google Trends.
Social Mention
Enter your competitors on Social Mention and get detailed analytics like mentioning frequency, sentiment, reach, etc., collected from across the web.
SimilarWeb
See where your competitor is getting its traffic from, what are the sources of the traffic and the demography of its audience.
BuzzSumo
Use Buzzsumo to know what kind of content is working best in your industry. Just use your industry keywords in Buzzsumo and see what kind of articles are getting the highest rate of social engagement.
Alternatively, enter your competitor’s domain and see what articles of your competitor are their best performing hits.
A handy tool to generate viral content and come up with viral headlines.
SpyFu
Learn your competitor’s PPC keywords and SEO strategies, search and download their keywords. An awesome PPC research tool.
Crayon
Track the changes of your competitor’s digital footprint and get email notifications of it.
SEMrush
Analyze your competitor’s top organic and paid keywords, backlinks and more with SEMrush.
Alexa
Get detailed web traffic statistics and analytics using Alexa.
Moz
Backlinks are critical for SEO. Get detailed back analysis of any of your competitor with this free tool.
Use the data to create better content and then approach these sites linking to your competitor to now link to you.
Siteliner
Use Siteliner to check for broken links of any site, and then help the site fix it by pitching your link as a replacement for it.
Ubersuggest – A Tool for Keywords
Ubersuggest is an all-in-one SEO tool that provides keyword analysis, competitive analysis, and SEO data. You can use it to explore new content ideas, find keywords, and see what your competition is doing. There’s also an Ubersuggest Chrome extension so you can get data on keywords and traffic as you browse the web.
Best Uses For This Tool:
- See what content and keywords are performing best for your competitors
- Find keywords to target
- Get content inspiration
- Find new competitors
Price: There’s a free limited plan, or you can get a paid plan starting at $29 per month.
Owletter – A Tool To Track Competitor’s Email
Most of the competitive analysis tools on this list focus on SEO, social, or paid ads. This one gives you a window into your competitor’s email marketing strategy. Tell Owletter which sites to track and you get access to every email your competition sends, including when they send it and their spam reputation.
Best Ways To Use This Tool:
- See how often competitors send emails
- Track emails based on specific keywords
- Long term access to data so you can spot trends over time
Pricing: $19 a month for up to 10 sites/$79 per month for unlimited
Social Blade – A Tool for Social Media Follower Counts
See real-time stats about your competitors on social media, including follower counts and the number of uploads. This tool is a quick way to get a lay of the land so you can build a stronger social media marketing strategy.
Best Uses for This Tool:
- See where your competition stands on multiple social platforms
Pricing: Starts at $3.99 per month, but there is a free limited version.
Google Keyword Planner – A Tool for Keywords
Formerly the Google Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator, this tool seems to have it all. Although it doesn’t focus specifically on competitor analysis (it’s more focused on your own website), finding competitor data is one feature of the tool. Because it’s from Google, it’s considered one of the best out there.
Best Ways to Use This Tool:
- Find competitor keyword data (paid and organic)
- Monitor your own website as well as those of your competitors
Price: Free, but you need to sign up for a free AdWords account to access
Instapaper – A Tool for Organization
This is a simple tool that allows you to save web pages for later to read on your computer, mobile phone, or even Kindle.
Once you sign up for an account (which takes just a few minutes), you can add the bookmarklet to your bookmark bar to keep things easy. When it comes to spying on your competition, it’s incredibly helpful to know who your competition is, first and foremost, and this tool will help.
Best Ways to Use This Tool:
- Save webpages to read later
- Add a bookmarklet to keep your content organized
- Visit competitor sites and save content that might be of use to you
Price: Free
Monitor Backlinks – A Tool for Keywords
This is another company with great customer service, and you can follow different competitors’ backlinks and have them sent straight to your inbox, with a description of which are the highest domains, which are the lowest, and whether or not they are dofollow or nofollow.
You have a dashboard you can look at and compare your results, but I like to use it primarily to look at links my competitors are earning.
Best Ways to Use This Tool:
- Send competitor backlinks to your inbox
- Analyze the highest and lowest domains of the links of your competitors
- Get a good picture of links that are nofollow vs. dofollow
- Compare your results with competitors thanks to the dashboard
- Find new link-building opportunities
Price: Pricing varies based on how many domains you want to manage.
If you want to manage only 1, it is $25.00/month, 2 is a Freelancer plan for $48.00/month, 4 is a Small Business plan for $90.00/month, and anything more is a custom plan which you would discuss with the company to determine a price.
They currently offer a free trial, so you can test before you commit.
SiteAlerts (free keyword, social media, and website competitor analysis tool)
This is one of the most easiest to use and completely free online competitor analysis tools that answer many questions such as:
How much traffic do your competitors get? Where does the traffic come from? What software tools do they use? What keywords do they rank for? Is social media working for them?
SiteAlerts is a simple but very useful keyword, social media, and website competitor analysis tool that will provide you with a lot of marketing stats about your competitors as well as the technology they use.
Free options: a free account with a good range of features and paid accounts
VisualPing (free website change checker)
Do you want to monitor seamlessly your competitor’s websites changes at no cost? If so, VisualPing can be your solution.
It get you notified on each visual change of a website or website area.
Thus, you can be alerted every time when your competitor update prices, publish news or other important information to users.
Visualping is one of the most easiest to use free website change checkers.
Free options: free account with 62 checks/month and premium accounts
WhatRuns (discover what technology drives your competitor’s website at no cost)
WhatRuns is a free technology lookup tool that will show you what technologies are used on any website.
Actually, this is a free browser extension that shows you the technologies used on your rival’s website at the click of a button.
WhatRuns shows you almost everything that a website has. Web apps they pay for, CDN they’re hosted on, WordPress plugins, fonts – and much more info!
Also, the tool notifies you when a website starts or stop using a technology.
Free options: only free
Rank Signals (free keyword, backlink, and SEO competitor analysis tool)
Rank Signals is one of the greatest free online competitor analysis tools that allows you to discover SEO backlinks and traffic sources of your competitors.
You might know how important backlinks are for a good SEO strategy.
Rank Signal helps you identify your competitors best links and evaluate the quality and value of the links.
If you searching for a solid basis for a link building strategy, don’t hesitate to use this tool.
Free options: only free
Moat (free tool for analyzing your competitors’ ad creative)
Moat is an awesome free online marketing analysis tool that act as digital-ad search engine. It shows you the competitor’s ad creative and campaigns.
Simply type in the online field a brand and you will see the ads that they are using.
It also displays the dimensions of the ad and the dates during which the ad was (is) active.
You can follow your competitors’ brands and get notified every time they publish a new ad.
Free options: a free account that work great and a PRO oprion
Conclusion
It’s a known fact that the best way to get your website optimized is by analyzing the competition in full and finding out what topics and keyword phrases they rank in google and which ones they don’t. Then you can go and take all their best keywords and start targeting them instead which is how we find easy long tail keywords to target for our own websites. The best way to do this is by using a seo website analyser such as Spyfu. If you don’t know much about spyfu yet, here you can read how it works, how to use it properly and the best features that it offers when comparing it to our other favourite seo competitor analysis tools such as SEMrush or Ubersuggest.