You decided to take your online store to the next level by hiring a professional SEO consultant. She’s been busy doing everything you think she should do…creating internal linking, focusing on content and keeping your website clean of duplicate content. And yet, the organic traffic you’re getting is still low.
Here we go.
Competitor Analysis from WooRank – a Little Bit of Everything
This is a tool that has competitor data as just a small section of all it can do. You create your project, and then it will help you track and optimize your website based on the results of that project. If you want to spy on competitors, that’s an option.
Best Ways to Use This Tool:
- Create projects to track
- Optimize your website based on project results
- Spy on your competitors as a potential project
Price: For agencies, they recommend the Premium plan for $179/month. For Webmasters, they recommend the PRO plan (only 1 project) for $59/month. You can start with a free trial.
SpyOnWeb – A Tool to Find Domain Information
This is a very popular tool because it’s so easy to use. With this tool, you enter a URL, Google AdSense or Google Analytics code, or IP address to find out what resources belong to the same owner.
In other words, when you type in a domain, you get results for all of the different IP addresses and then a list of domains that have that same IP address (in some cases a site will have more than one IP address).
Best Ways to Use This Tool:
- Discover the different IP addresses to find domain information
Price: Free
SimilarWeb – A Tool for Web Rankings
This is a tool that allows you to get traffic insights for any website. You type in a website and right away you’ll get the global rank, country rank, and category rank of that website, along with a nice graph that shows the weekly number of visitors in the last six months.
You can see how many leads come from social, search, referrals, display ads, and many more. There also is a big orange bar that lets you add competitors and even gives you suggestions on who you may want to watch.
Best Ways to Use This Tool:
- Obtain traffic insights for any website
- Obtain global, country, and category rank for any website
- Receive suggestions of competitors you may want to watch
- View the data in graphic format
Price: There is a basic free account that offers limited metrics and data. You can contact the company if you’re interested in the enterprise package
Google Alerts – A Tool for Monitoring Mentions
This is a very simple and easy-to-use tool that will send reports right to your inbox. If you want to know every single time your competitor is mentioned online, whether as a link or simply a mention, you’ll get that report. You can monitor keywords as well. It’s up to you what you want to track.
Best Ways to Use This Tool:
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- Get competitors’ backlinks
- Monitor social (or other website) mentions of your company
- Monitor keyword mentions
Price: Free
SocialMention – A Tool for Monitoring Mentions
This tool has lots of cool features that focus on blogs, video, and social (all the “cool” stuff). Enter in a search term, either a keyword or a company, and the tool will tell you what’s being said about that term across blogs and social platforms.
You can see how many times and how often it’s mentioned and you even can subscribe to an RSS feed for that term, so you never miss a beat.
Best Ways to Use This Tool:
- Monitor and track keyword mentions
- Monitor company mentions
- Cross-analyze what is being said across different social networks
Price: Free
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
Alexa – monitor traffic
Alexa allows tracking global web traffic of your own and competitor websites. “Information is power,” and Alexa is one of those must-have tools that you can use to transform data into competitive value for your business.
If you have the Moz toolbar, it will show you any website’s Alexa ranking. It lets you spy on your competitors’ backlinks, traffic, keywords, etc.
How to best use this tool: It is interesting to compare similar websites in your niche: get data on international competitors and website rankings for an overall picture.
Conclusion
If you are not setting up a Website competitor analysis, you are missing out on a great opportunity. There are numerous free Seo competitor analysis tools that can help you stay ahead of your competitors. By setting up a competitor analysis framework, you have access to important metrics about your competition which can give you competitive advantages against them. Failing to set up a competitor analysis framework is akin to throwing away free information that could help bring about targeted, relevant traffic to your site. Competitor analysis provides vital insights into what your competitors are doing so that you can replicate the best tactics while avoiding other tactics that are impacting negatively on your website