Being a well informed SEO is a vital skill for anyone in the industry. Knowing your competitors well enables you to optimize your own website, content and outreach for higher rankings. Mediawiki tags have been around since 2004, but few SEOs take advantage of this powerful tool to its full potential. In this post I will demonstrate how you can use competitor analysis reports to narrow down your research to head off busywork and skip straight to answering questions that bring in traffic and revenue.
Here are the best competitive analysis seo tools that will keep you ahead.
SpyFu
SpyFu have a range of SEO competitor analysis features inside their tool, as Jennifer Noto of Carolinas IT explains: “Spyfu allows you to view the SEO performance of any company and ranks your keywords in comparison to your competitors.”
“It’s a really easy way to find out your competitors top-performing keywords and discover their PPC ad spend.”
However, Vizion Interactive‘s Kritien Matelski argues that one feature of their software is more important than the others: “SpyFu’s Kombat feature is one of the most critical.”
“In addition to showing overlap between our client’s site and that of a competitors, we can easily use this data to understand what gaps there are that we can optimize for advantageously, or, where we need to do more work to ensure that our clients receive their fair share of traffic in cases where competitors are more successful.”
Surfer
“The most important step is auditing the site and pages to identify gaps with competitors,” says Vishal Srivastava of Trainedge Consulting.
“I use Surfer.com for the audit because it has very specific recommendations for the page you are auditing. All SEO tools show you what’s wrong with meta tags and who is linking to your competitors.”
“But Surfer goes beyond that and compares your content to those rankling in top ten. It tells you whether to add more or remove content, where to add or remove exact and similar keywords and a list of sites that link to more than one of the pages in top ten.”https://www.youtube.com/embed/A6VxpsOa9ZY?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent
Srivastava summarizes: “I find their recommendations very action oriented and generally lead to a bump in rankings.”
8. Searchmetrics
Georgie Kemp of Impression thinks the best way to do SEO competitor analysis is “on Searchmetrics, using the organic competitor visibility function in alignment with the Google updates function.”
“This can help to understand whether how heavy competitors where impacted from an algorithm update, and how we can learn from what competitors are doing well within a client’s own strategy,” Kemp adds.
Searchmetrics
This tool was founded in 2005 by Marcus Tober and was primarily focused on competitive analysis. After a couple of years, Searchmetrics began shifting its focus more toward the enterprise market.
As content marketing influence kept growing, Searchmetrics concentrated on content marketing performance rather than SEO.
However, the Searchmetrics Suite will still tell you about a site’s position in search, how well a certain domain is ranking in Google, and for what kind of keywords it is ranking for.
As mentioned earlier, some tools can incorrectly identify your competitors.ADVERTISEMENTCONTINUE READING BELOW
Searchmetrics, in particular, has an algorithm that is based on matching sets of keywords without considering any additional metrics.
On the screenshot below you can see that Searchmetrics shows that the competitive landscape of Search Engine Journal consists of Google, YouTube, and Wikipedia:
However, let’s not jump to conclusions here.
If we let this minor flaw slide, I can say that Searchmetrics has a nice array of handy organic rankings reports that automatically filters out long-tail keywords by displaying them in a separate tab:
iSpionage
It seems like most tools visualize their data alike.
However, iSpionage supports more search engines including Bing and Yahoo, and covers Google databases like Australia and Canada.
Unlike SpyFu, the list of top organic competitors in iSpionage doesn’t look so well organized.
However, it’s one step ahead of Searchmetrics by displaying fine-tuned results:
Ahrefs
Ahrefs, similar to SEMrush, is a competitor analysis tool for SEO and is equally popular. Ahrefs provides features that let you perform keyword research, backlink research, content research, rank tracking, and web monitoring for your domain and competitors’ domains. These are some of Ahrefs’ most popular features:
Keyword analysis tool – you can extract keyword data by keyword, or by domain. Along with data like search volume and competition, Ahrefs also shows keyword click data which is something most other tools don’t.
Backlink research – Ahrefs provides a lot of data related to a domain’s backlinks. You can check other domains linking to a website, the anchor text, the inserted link, and also outgoing link from a domain.
Site audit – Ahrefs provides an actionable SEO audit report with data pertaining to pages, links, performance, etc. It also analyses all pages and provides an architecture structure, something many other tools do not provide.
Rank tracking – You can add your domain and competitors’ domains and check SERP rankings for keywords over time.
Ahrefs is one of the best tools for competitor analysis. The main difference between SEMrush and Ahrefs is that Ahrefs is better with backlink analysis- it provides more data, and with content analysis- it provides a list of top-ranking articles, links to it, broken links to it, and suggested topics. SEMrush, however, is better for someone looking to extract paid ad metrics as well as SEO metrics.
While perfecting SEO and website performance is important, what’s even more important is perfecting your brand image. Here is an article we recently published that will give you more insights: The Effective Guide to Efficient Brand Marketing for Businesses.
Competitor Analysis Tools for Keyword Analysis
Google Keyword Planner
While you can use the SEO and website audit tools mentioned above for keyword planning, they are both paid solutions. If you’re looking for a reliable keyword planner and competitor keyword analyzer, Google Keyword Planner is a great tool that is also free. You can enter a keyword, and Google Keyword Planner shows you your entered keywords and all other relevant keywords along with search data, CPC values, etc.
One great feature of Google Keyword Planner is that you can enter a competitor’s domain and it analyzes the website to give you a list of keywords that domain is ranking for and actively targeting (through their content). You can use this information to create your own keyword strategy. Since it is created and managed by Google, it is one of the best tools for competitor analysis in terms of keywords and is a free online competitor analysis tool.
Ubersuggest
Like Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest is a free online competitor analysis tool. You can use it to research keywords by adding your competitors’ domain and getting a list of keywords they are targeting.
Additionally, Ubersuggest also extracts key metrics like your competitors’ ranked organic keywords, monthly organic traffic, backlink data, domain score, etc. You can use it to view a competitor’s top pages, get content ideas, and also perform a site audit like you can with SEMrush or Ahrefs.
Here’s a great video that gives you insights on competitor analysis and also a tutorial on how to use Ubersuggest: How To SEO Competitor Analysis – Spy On Your Competitors Keywords & Top-Ranking Pages To Outrank
Competitor Analysis Tools for Social Media
Competitor Analysis Tools for Social Media
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is one of the best social analytics tools. It lets you gather data for platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. It lets you track published posts, engagement, likes/dislikes, etc. for your social media handles and for competitors. This gives you a trend analysis for the performance of your posts and your competitors’ posts.
Along with extracting competitor data, Sprout Social also analyses keywords to give content ideas, identifies influencers, and extracts sentiments based on reactions to topics, products, competitors, etc.
Social Blade
Social Blade provides user statistics and data for selected handles on social media platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and Twitter. It is a great tool for competitor analysis – primarily to find your most core competitors based on numbers. You can track their growth on a day-by-day basis. For quick information about a competitor’s social media metrics, Social Blade can be used as a free online competitor analysis tools.
Social Mention
Social Mention is a tool that provides data on those blogs, images (through alt-text), videos, questions, microblogs, etc. that have a mention of the entered keyword. This is a great tool that can be used to identify websites/links that have mentioned your brand, so you can maintain brand reputation. You can also use it to identify websites/links that mention your competitors so you know where they are posting their content. You can approach the same or similar websites to get your content published.
Conclusion
Competitor Analysis is one of the most important SEO strategies in 2016. This strategy will allow you to find your gaps in the market and make specific changes to rank higher in both Google and Bing. Make sure that you are using this method on a regular basis to ensure that you are staying ahead of the competition.