Competitor Analysis is a process of analyzing each and every aspect of your competitor’s website to get more website traffic, leads and sales. Because of this, competitor analysis is very important part in search engine optimization. So in this blog post i am going to tell you how you can do competitor analysis for your blog or business with the help of some free tools and resources over internet
Here is the best performing competitor analysis review. Can’t wait for it? Jump right below this post. But, Here are few things you should know!
Serpstat: Collect data on rival SEO and PPC campaigns
Serpstat is one of the most trusted SEO competitor tracker tools on the market. Top brands like Samsung, Deloitte, and Shopify use the platform to sharpen their SEO strategies and monitor competing websites.
Evaluate your competitor’s SEP campaigns with Serpstat. Research emerging keyword trends, and monitor your competitors’ content strategies too.
Learn which keywords and campaigns are earning your competitors’ money, then use the same tactics to grow your customer base.
Pricing: Serpstat’s packages range from $55 to $399 a month, depending on the number of daily searches you need.
Buzzsumo: Uncover innovative marketing ideas and create high-performing content
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.
SpyFu – view competitor keywords
SpyFu is a powerful tool that lets you view all data on competitors’ keywords in both organic search and AdWords – and get even more related keywords. You just need to add competitors’ keywords and get an overall view of their strategy.
How to best use SpyFu: You can easily get a list of keywords that your competitors are targeting in organic search and AdWords. This is a good tool to research niches, new keywords, and plan tests.
Pro tip: View the destination URL for each ad in order to see how the competition is utilizing landing pages.
Open Site Explorer – monitor backlinks
Open Site Explorer is a well-known and easy-to-use tool from Moz that helps to monitor backlinks. Not only can you follow all competitors’ backlinks, but use that date to improve your link building strategies. What’s great here is how much you get – data on page and domain authority, anchor text, linking domains, and compare links up to 5 websites.
How to best use this tool: You can easily check out what links you competitors have, compare their link profiles with your links, and boost link building strategies.
Moat – find where ads are running
Moat is a multifunctional tool for advertising industry. With it, find out what ads are running for different websites and top brands. You can view the places and size of recently displayed ads and Moat provides a step-by-step guide on where to place your own ads.
How to best use Moat: You can enter the brand names of the competitors you want to spy on and get an overall report of the display ads they’re running.
Mention: Competitor monitoring and social media management tool
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.
Using media monitoring for competitive analysis lets you track all websites talking about any keyword. By setting up alerts in Mention, you can find get real-time alerts when other websites link to your competitor.
But you can also monitor the websites just talking about your competitor or their products, yet not linking to them. This tells you they’re interested in your niche, so you may be able to beat your competitor to the backlink.
How to use Mention better: Head over to the influencers dashboard to quickly sort the websites in your results by influence and Alexa ranking to see which backlinks are probably providing the most value.
Click here to request Mention’s free demo.
iSpionage – track keywords
iSpionage is one of the spying tools that makes it easy to see what your competitors are doing organic search. It has a set of tools that includes SEO competitive research, social monitoring, and keyword tracking.
How to best use iSpionage: This tool allows you to enter competitors and check out the best keywords for organic and PPC, how much they spend on both, and see the most effective ad copy. Then it provides comparison graphs for you – no number crunching necessary.
Followerwonk – analyze Twitter followers
Followerwonk analyzes any Twitter profile for free to boost your Twitter marketing strategies. It provides a wide range of details, like recent tweets, bios, locations, and the authority of followers, to get the overall picture of your competitors’ Twitter presence.
How to best use Followerwonk: You can optimize your Twitter presence through the analysis of competitors’ followers, location, tweets, and content. The best feature is finding users by keyword and comparing them by metrics like age, language of the followers, and how active and authoritative they are. You can also view the progress of your growing, authoritative followers.
Simply Measured – curate social data
Simply Measured is one of the best aggregators of raw data for social metrics. It helps you to find out how your competitors are doing on trends, branding, traffic, conversions, and more. You can get to access 35 different reports on competitors.
How to best use Simply Measured: The tool gives you a detailed competitive analysis for each network. You can also figure out which competitor strategies work, thus, and which you can beat them at.
You will also see a detailed comparison of all the most important stats like as engagement, follower change over time and average response rates.
Feedly: Keep up with your competitors’ content marketing efforts
Feedly is a newsreader that lets you subscribe to competitor websites via their RSS feeds.
Receive notifications every time your rivals update their pages or make a blog post.
Feedly also downloads your updates. You don’t have to waste time visiting multiple websites just to snoop on your rivals, you can read them all within the app.
Price: Feedly’s baseline package costs $6 a month and lets you subscribe to 1,000 feeds.
Upgrading to another package gives you more subscriptions and other perks. For example, Twitter subscriptions and research feeds for your whole team.
Click here to try Feedly for free.
Complete PRO – get demographic info
Compete PRO is considered a “digital intelligence” tool, used to track passive online consumer behavior, seasonal trends between competitors, and demographic information (you should register your site to check this info).
How to better use Complete: Complete is best used for data visualization – it makes comparing and presenting data easy.
Owler: Track the companies that matter
Owler is a comprehensive competitor analysis tool that lets you keep a close eye on your biggest rivals. You can use it to improve your content strategy or assess the performance of other businesses.
Track down hard-to-find company data, business news, and other strategic information you want to know about brands in your industry.
It’s like you have your very own seat in your competitor’s boardroom.
Pricing: Owler’s free plan gives you limited insights into five companies. Premium packages start at $99 a year and grants access to more information.
Click here to create a free Owler account.
Quantcast – view audience insights
Quantcast helps get you get to know potential clients via detailed reports on: demographics, lifestyle and interest affinities, website, audience insights, and conversion level.
The reports give you a clear understanding about your audience, help to improve your marketing plans, and make your media campaigns effective.
How to best use Quantcast: It’s most useful for providing traffic figures based on demographic data to better target your audience in your campaign. Make sure to compare your data against that of your competitors.
SpyOnWeb – see behind the curtain
SpyOnWeb is a well-known tool that’s easy to use. It allows you to figure out which websites belong to the same website owner. It provides all information related to the entry on one page, collected from publicly available resources.
How to better use SpyOnWeb: You can gather all information about IP addresses, Google AdSense IDs, Google Analytics IDs, and Yahoo Publisher Network ID. Just n enter the domain URL and you will get results of all IP addresses and a list of domains with the same IP address.
Ontolo – for content marketing
Ontolo is a good tool for backlink monitoring and content marketing. It assists with determining good content topics, finding authors to reach out to, and improving your link building strategies.
How to best use Ontolo: I really like the idea of filtering out links that can be a waste of time, and finding authors who link to your content. Thanks to Ontolo, I learned how to find the right keyword for a given page.
Fanpage Karma: Extensive social media management suite
Fanpage Karma is a competitive analysis tool that lets you track brands’ social media activity on an easy-to-use dashboard. Get an in-depth analysis of your competitors’ social strategy by measuring their:
- Growth
- Engagement
- Response time
- And other metrics that are typically only available to the account owner
The tool also measures the success rate of your competition’s social media campaigns. See which posts gave your competitors more followers and apply those tactics to your campaigns.
Pricing: Fanpage Karma offers a free account that tracks the campaign performance of one Facebook account.
They offer several enterprise packages ranging from $69 to $799 a month, which allow you to track more social media accounts.
Click here to start a free Fanpage Karma trial.
Few Tips to Toe 🙂
Build up a portfolio and get as much experience as possible
If you’re hoping to work as a freelance SEO content writer, building up a portfolio is very important. You will need this to showcase your work and skills in order to convince clients they should work with you. In addition to collating a history of any previous publications, you could consider starting up your own blog or guest posting on other sites. However, remember to focus on your niche as much as possible and accumulate as many different samples of your work as you can.
On the other hand, if you’re just starting out as an SEO content writer and you don’t have a lot of work to add to your portfolio, try creating your own samples to showcase your skills. Other great ways to get content writing experience include:
• Guest posting for free
• Networking with other writers in your niche
• Letting people know you’re available for hire
• Asking for a referral
• Pitching your own ideas to potential clients
• Joining Facebook groups and LinkedIn
• Signing up to a copywriting service like Copify
Master the art of research
When writing SEO content, you’ll need to master the art of incorporating keywords into your writing in order to optimise your client’s ranking on the search engines. Some clients will provide a list of keywords they would like you to include in your copy, but others will leave the task of developing a keyword list to you. If this is the case, you’ll need to be able to perform successful keyword research.
A good keyword research strategy will include creating a list of the most relevant topics based on what you know about the business and researching related search terms. You may also need to look into your client’s competitors and see how they are ranking for these keywords. Once you’ve completed these steps, you can then use a tool such as the Google AdWords Keyword Planner to cut down your list.
However, there are a couple of other important things to bear in mind, including not over-optimising your content or keyword stuffing. Neil Patel says:
“If you want to write the best content that will rank well in Google, you have to target keyword phrases. Avoid stuffing keywords or over-optimisation. Ideally, put the keyword in your headline, but make sure that it reads smoothly for your readers.”
Don’t forget about social media
A large part of SEO writing is encouraging other people to share your work on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms, which will increase the authority of your content and will boost its ranking in Google for your chosen keywords. Because of this, any aspiring content writer should ensure they’re familiar with the most popular social media sites. You’ll also need to be willing to adopt new methods and technologies as they arise, so be sure to stay up to date with any changes.
Top SEO copy tips
- You are not your reader. Do not write for yourself, write for your target audience.
- Mimic the language and voice of your audience, whether that’s third-person formal or second-person conversational.
- Include keywords where they will have the most impact: metadata, header tags, page title and anchor text.
- Use short paragraphs of only a few sentences.
- Strategically leave white space so readers can scan content at a glance.
- Externally link only to reputable, authoritative sites with high Domain Authority scores.
- Internally link only where relevant – not to every single related blog post or possible CTA.
- Include as much data as possible to support your claims.
- Embed relevant imagery so that visuals can complement your narrative.
- Think of search queries as article titles.
- Write for as long as it takes to comprehensively cover the topic (aka don’t aim for an arbitrary word count).
- Write with featured snippets in mind.
Know your audience, start with the why, and have a goal in mind
Determining your message and the question you will answer for your target audience should always come first. This allows you to stay on topic and focus your efforts. To do this, however, requires an awareness of who your audience is. Building a buyer persona is one way to figure that out. Once you know who you are writing for, your goal or reason for creating the post should always include an element of value creation for them. To see what people are looking for on the topic of “SEO content,” I did some research. .
Do your research
You cannot rely solely on what you think your audience is interested in. Research gives you insight into how you can address concerns, answer questions and add value for those seeking information on a topic. AnswerThePublic is a fantastic tool for finding keywords and suggesting content ideas. I used this tool and noticed a lot of questions seeking clarification on what SEO content is and also how to produce it. Focusing on the topic of how to develop it became the outline for this post.
Source: AnswerThePublic
Determine your SEO keywords
Keywords determine where you appear in the search rankings. How high in the rankings one appears is not solely based on an exact match to the terms being searched, but also related terms. There are three types of keywords to be aware of: short-tail, medium-tail and long-tail. Short-tail keywords are typically 1 word, medium-tail keywords are roughly 2 to 3 words and long-tails are usually 3 to 5 words. Each type ranges in its level of competitiveness from highly competitive to less competitive, and a mix of these types should be incorporated into your strategy. Here are a few other considerations when choosing keywords:
- Make sure they are organized and relevant.
- Use your keyword in your title
- Emphasize the placement of most of your keywords towards the top of the post
- Use variations on the terms within the post
Develop an outline and craft your post, making sure to optimize throughout
Having a structure and a plan will guide you in writing an effective post and make the process easier. From there, start building out your content and incorporating your keywords throughout! When writing, keep in mind that the length of your post matters. Your article or post cannot rank highly in the search results pages with only 100 words on a page. According to research from Backlinko, the first page result on Google contains 1,890 words on average. Other techniques for optimizing your post include incorporating keywords in header titles, adding alt text to images and writing a meta description. After your post has been crafted, remember to edit! Bring in another set of eyes to review your post for typos and ensure clarity of content.
Create a content calendar
A content calendar will help keep you on task and prevent you from scrambling to find content. It will also provide a quick resource for you to reference to determine which topics you can build off of and serve as a reminder of what topics have already been covered. Periodically review the calendar, identify content gaps, and then write to fill those gaps.
Build a firm foundation with technical SEO
Being an effective SEO content writer will require a mix of research and copywriting skills, as well as a familiarity with some of the more technical aspects of SEO. To develop content that is both rich in quality and substantial enough in quantity is one piece of the overarching strategy to optimize results. It is important to note that before diving into the content, laying the foundation for a good website should happen first to maximize overall strategy effectiveness. Find additional suggestions on improving your website’s SEO here and use these 5 tips as a resource when developing your first post!
Conclusion
Competitor SEO analysis is necessary for your online marketing, no matter what niche you’re in. The level of competition in your niche is something important to consider. This can be a powerful tool for your SEO campaigns if you do it correctly.