Free competitor analysis tools can give you a wealth of information about your competitors, which will ultimately help your business. When taken seriously and used wisely, free competitor analysis tools can turn a profit. It can also expose weaknesses in a business before a competitor takes advantage of them.
The truth is that there are too many free competitor analysis tools out there to count. For this reason, I put together this guide to help you learn how to pick the best ones for each situation you face
SE Ranking
More than 500,000 users chose the SE Ranking platform to get a comprehensive set of SEO tools to audit and improve the website’s performance. Whether you want to start a new business or gain an advantage in your industry, competitor and keyword research is your starting point.
Using SE Ranking’s competitor analysis tool, you can reveal your rivals’ organic and paid strategies. For example, you can find competitors keywords that drive traffic, analyze recently added backlinks, and spy on Google Ads marketing campaigns.
You get instant access to SE Ranking website analysis data:
- search results overview by country;
- domain and page trust;
- traffic cost;
- traffic estimate;
- backlinks;
- referring domains;
- the number of key phrases;
- keyword rankings;
- distribution of organic and paid competitors;
- CPC and number of advertisers;
- SERP features.
For those who need a more profound competitor analysis, SE Ranking released a historical data update that now allows analyzing domains and keywords for previous months starting from February 2020.
All you need to do is to select a month to check changes in website traffic, keywords, and backlinks.
How could you get an advantage using this feature? By analyzing competitor performance in dynamics, you’ll get valuable insights about:
- changes in the niche landscape;
- traffic drops and reasons behind them;
- effective practices of competitor’s promotion strategies;
- best-performing keywords in PPС campaigns.
Based on the most comprehensive SEO competitor analysis with SE Ranking, you will be ready to make more thoughtful SEO decisions, save the A/B testing budget, and promptly respond to changes in the market.
You can try SE Ranking for free.
Crayon Intel Free
This great marketing intelligence tool can help you track, analyze, and act on many things that happen outside of your business.
With Crayon Intel Free you can monitor seamlessly the content and design changes from your competitors.
You can have a collection of competitors, track inspirational brands, get daily email digests, and get a comprehensive view of your competitors’ moves.
Crayon Intel Free is completely free to use, and you can track any number of companies.
Free options: only free account
Sprout Social
With social media ranked the No. 1 channel for connecting with customers, there’s no better starting point for competitive analysis.
Sprout Social enables you to understand competitor performance on social media from multiple angles and data points.
You can use Sprout’s suite of competitive reports to assess and optimize your social strategy with rich data points you can track across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Whether you want to get a sneak peek at what your competitors are posting or benchmark your growth against the average of the profiles being compared, it’s all a click away, minus the tedious manual research and messy spreadsheets.
Up your analytics game with Sprout’s Premium Analytics tool that offers deeper insights into your social platforms, along with interactive charts and graphs that you can customize to align with your goals.
Sprout offers the same competitive analytics on Instagram too.
And you can dive even deeper using Sprout’s Advanced Listening tool.
By tapping into publicly available social conversations, you can quickly find out how consumers feel about your competitors’ products and services, as well as examine your own share of voice in your industry.
Buzzsumo
Get an up-close look at your competitor’s content strategy with Buzzsumo.
This handy tool lets you analyze the content your competitors are putting out.
Buzzsumo is great for researching the latest content. It gives you a breakdown of your rival’s keywords and topics. You can see what people are saying about competing brands on social media and what type of content resonates with their followers.
Pricing: The free Buzzsumo plan gives users 10 searches a month.
Premium subscriptions start at $99 a month. Those come with unlimited searches and a wide range of additional features.
Click here to try Buzzsumo free for 30 days.
Similar Web
One of the best competitor analysis tools our there is Similar Web.
Similar Web is a go-to tool for search traffic analysis and much more in paid version. With its help, you can gain the following competitive intelligence:
- Volume of traffic: with this knowledge, you can estimate market share of your competitors, at least when it comes to website traffic
- Sources of traffic: this knowledge can tell you quantities in which your competitors acquire traffic between paid acquisition, referral, and organic traffic.
- Ad display: what ads and where they display them
To compare the performance of your website to your competitor’s, enter your site address first:
Next, provide your competitor’s web address:
In the free version of the tool, you can see global rank, country rank and category rank:
Also, the free version of Similar Web offers traffic overview:
And site traffic sources:
These are features you can investigate using the free version of Similar Web.
On the basis of traffic source, you can see the differences between you and your competitors. For example, if you see that your competitor performs well in organic traffic, you can concentrate your efforts on social traffic.
How?
By addressing your audience’s needs and creating highly shareable content.
At the same time, it’ll boost your referral traffic, grow brand awareness, and build your expert authority. In the long run, it’ll also improve your SEO reputation as Google bot likes content that engages readers.
The pro version of Similar Web offers much more in competitor analysis:
- Referrals
- Social
- Display
- Content
- Audience
- Competitors
- Mobile apps
Talkwalker’s Free Social Search
Do you wanna know what social media strategies are your competitors pursuing? You can get the answer for free by Talkwalker’s Free Social Search.
This is a great real-time free social media search engine that can provide you with unlimited searches across all major social networks.
You can get an instant overview of your competitors’ social media campaigns. The tool shows you who’s talking about you and your competitors with live audience insights.
And the best thing is that you can enjoy unlimited real-time data.
Free options: only free
Mention
Mention collects insights that improve your marketing plan and website traffic. This competitor analysis tool notifies you when someone mentions your rivals on social media, blog posts, and news sites.
Download the mobile app and get real-time notifications when your competitor is active. That way, you’ll stay ahead of the curve when it comes to mastering the best marketing practices in your industry.
Price: Mention offers a free package that tracks one competitor across three social media platforms. Premium packages start at $29 a month and let users set up more alerts.
The ProPlus plan is their largest package. It costs $199 a month and tracks seven competitors across 15 different social media sites.
Conclusion:
There are three free competitor analysis tools for you to use when analysing your competitors’ marketing efforts. Using competitor analysis tools is great if you are looking for guidance on how an industry works or just want to evaluate the market in general.