Competitor analysis is one of the most important things that you should take into consideration when planning your SEO campaign. It helps you evaluate your current position in the SERPs, what to expect in the future, and how to plan your strategy around it. There are lots of ways to analyze your competitors like competitor rankings report, spyfu, etc.
You will be able to analyse your competitor using this best free seo tools. Are you ready?
Feedly (free news aggregator site for tracking competitors’ news and mentions)
Feedly is a news aggregator site that can work greatly as one of the free online competitor analysis tools .
It’s one of the easiest ways for checking your competitors’ new posts without bouncing all over the web. You won’t miss a beat from your competitors’ news and mentions.
With Feedly you are able to monitor easily news about your competitors’ products, services, posts, content, Tweets or even YouTube videos.
You can create a collection for a given topic – news, competitors, etc. – and put all the sites you currently read into the list.
Moreover, Feedly also recommends other similar and related sites based on the your collection content.
Free options: a free version that will keep you up to date with content and a paid account
Semrush (A Tool for Keywords)
This definitely is one of my favorite tools because it specializes in competitor data. You can visit the homepage and type in a competitor’s website (completely free) and immediately get information regarding organic keywords and rank, ad keywords, and traffic. The best part: it all comes to you in a graphic format.
Best Ways to Use This Tool:
- Get organic keywords and ranks of competitors
- Get ad keywords and traffic numbers of competitors
- Look at data in a graphic format
Price: You can get a large amount of information right on the homepage search bar. (Try it out yourself and you’ll see in less than three seconds.)
If you want some really detailed data, plans range from $99.95/month to $399.95/month.
SpyFu (A Tool for Keyword and Ad Monitoring)
This is an easy-to-use tool that lets you know which keywords your competitors are targeting, both in organic search and in AdWords. You simply type in your competitor and you can download an entire list of these keywords.
Best Ways to Use This Tool:
- Obtain a list of keywords your competitors are targeting for AdWords
- Obtain a list of keywords your competitors are targeting in organic search
Price: The Basic plan is $39/month, the Professional plan is $78/month, and the Agency plan is $299/month.
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.
This is one of the most comprehensive free online competitor analysis tools when it comes to traffic insights for any website.
Just type a website in the online field and instantly you’ll get global rank, country rank, and category rank of that website.
You also will see nice graphs that show the traffic sources, top 5 organic keywords of your competitor’s website, the leads from social media channels, audience Interests, and much more.
SimilarWeb lets you add competitors and even gives you suggestions on who you may want to follow and watch.
Free options: a free account with a good range of features and paid accounts
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.
What Runs Where ( A Tool for Monitoring Ads)
Although this resource specializes in online media buying and helping businesses buy correctly, it has some great features for watching your competition. It supports over 40 ad networks across several different countries and allows you to track a list of your competitors. You then get an alert every time that competitor launches a new ad or publishes new content.
Best Ways to Use This Tool:
- Track ad production of competitors
- Receive alerts each time a new ad or content is published
Price: Plans run for $299/month for the Basic plan and $399/month for the Full Coverage plan.
Link Explorer (A Tool for Backlinks)
This tool comes from Moz, so you know it’s got to be good. It’s one of the most popular tools out there today, and it allows you to follow your competitors’ link-building efforts. You can see who is linking back to them regarding PageRank, authority/domain, and anchor text. You also can compare link data, which can help keep things easy.
Best Ways to Use This Tool:
- Find out who is linking to your competitors
- Compare link data of your competitors
Price: You can get some data for free right away, but in order to use Link Explorer to the fullest extent, you will need Moz’s Analytics Standard package for $99/month.
Talkwalker’s Free Social Search (free social media competitor analysis tool)
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
Ahrefs – A Tool for Backlinks
This is another popular tool. It will show you things like top pages, IPs, and external links regarding your competitors. Speaking from experience, the site has great customer service and works with you to make sure you get what you need.
Best Ways to Use This Tool:
- Find IPs and external links to your competitors
Price: You can start a trial for $7.00, then upgrade to a variety of plans starting at $99.00/month.
Alexa – A Tool for Web Rankings
This is one of the more advanced tools available, and it has been rating websites for a long time (much like a PageRank). In fact, if you have the Moz toolbar, you will see the Alexa ranking of a site right there on your SERP.
This tool does it all when it comes to spying on your competitors (linking, traffic, keywords, etc.) and is an excellent resource if your competitors are international.
Best Ways to Use This Tool:
- Obtain data on international competitors
- Obtain rankings of websites for an overall picture
Price: The Advanced plan is $149/month for one user and one site. You can upgrade to the Agency Plan to include 20 users and 35 sites. You can start with a free trial.
BuiltWith Technology Profiler
See what technology is being used by your competitor.
Crayon Intel Free (free market intelligence tool that monitor competitor’s content and design changes)
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
VidIQ
A nifty tool that comes loaded with competitor analysis features.
To use this, just sign up for VidIQ and get their chrome extension for free. Next, when you play a YouTube video, VidIQ will give you all the insider data about your competitor’s video that will help you reverse engineer your competitor’s video plan.
Use it to get competitor data like tags used in competitor’s video, social performance of the competitor video, description length, description link count, no. of views per hour, and an overall score of the video in terms of SEO best practices.
Conclusion
A SEO website analysis can be an easy way to obtain information about the topic your article covers and the competitiveness of the niche. This is one of the stages where you can determine whether you need to outrank the competition or not.