Competitor Analysis is a skill many SEOs struggle with. How do we know how well our competitors are doing? Without proper tools and techniques, no one can say for sure. SeoToolsForCompetitorAnalysis.com is a resource that offers advice on how to use tools and techniques to perform Competitor Analysis and thus leverage findings into useful analysis for your site’s own business goals.
This is definitely one of the most powerful type of tools available. If you are struggling to determine what the best seo tools for competitor analysis are, here is my take on key features that I recommend looking for, and why.
Ubersuggest
When spying on your competition, there are three things you want to focus on:
- Top keywords
- Number of backlinks and where they come from
- Top pages
Ubersuggest makes it easy to quickly dig up and analyze this information. And once you do that, you’re able to adjust your strategy with the idea of outranking your competitors. Here are the steps:
Step #1: Enter Your Competitor’s URL and Click “Search”
Step #2: Click “Keywords” in the Left Sidebar
Step #3: Review the Keyword List
This particular site ranks for more than 322,000 keywords, giving you a clear idea of what they’re targeting and where their traffic is coming from.
In addition to the keyword list, there are four other columns:
- Volume – the average monthly search volume of the keyword
- Position – the position the URL is ranked in Google search
- Estimated visits -the estimated traffic the webpage gets for the keyword
- SD – the estimated competition in organic search
You can then click on a keyword to learn more:
This provides more information on the top 100 URLs in Google search for the keyword. The left column displays the ranking, with the others sharing:
- Estimated visits – the estimated traffic the webpage gets for the keyword
- Links – the number of backlinks from other websites
- DS – the overall strength of the website, scored from 1 (low) to 100 (high)
- Social shares – the total number of times the URL was shared on social
Piggybacking off the above, you can learn more about your competitor’s backlink profile. Navigate back to the sidebar and click “Backlinks.”
This takes you to an overview that looks like this:
It’s here that you’ll find:
- Domain score – the overall strength of the website, scored from 1 (low) to 100 (high)
- Backlinks – the overall number of backlinks to the website
- Referring domains – the number of unique domains linking back to the website
- Backlinks over time – a graph showing backlink growth
While all this information is helpful, I want you to scroll down the page until you see the “Backlinks” section:
This is the most important section, as it displays every incoming link to your competitor’s site. You can use this list to target the same websites with hopes that they’ll link to yours, too.
Finally, it never hurts to know your competitor’s top pages. You’ll find a list by clicking on “Top Pages” in the left sidebar:
In addition to the title and hyperlink for every page, you’ll also find:
- Estimated visits – the estimated traffic the webpage gets for the keyword
- Backlinks – the number of backlinks from other websites
- Social shares – the number of shares on Facebook and Pinterest
Now that you’ve taken these steps, you no longer have to guess about your competitor’s SEO strategy. You now know their top keywords, top pages, and where their backlinks are coming from.
QuickSprout
If you don’t generate traffic to your blog, what else matters?
It doesn’t matter how valuable your products and services are. Without the right kind of traffic, you’ll fail. In fact, Matt Lloyd once said, during a presentation, that the right kind of traffic should be your number one focus to capture market share.
Data from HubSpot showed that B2B marketers who use blogs generate 67% more leads than those who don’t. Prioritizing blogging will give you 13x positive ROI.
Blogging is a powerful traffic and sales driver, but it requires you to create the kind of high-quality content that’ll attract search users, social media fans and your target audience.
If your competitors are attracting visitors to their sites, the question that you have to ask yourself is, “Why am I struggling to get the right visitors to my site?”
Use the QuickSprout competitor analysis tool to learn about sites similar to yours and to figure out how to outrank them. Simply follow these steps to start driving traffic to your blog even in a competitive landscape:
i). First step: Check a site URL – On the QuickSprout homepage, input your competitor’s URL (e.g., Marieforleo.com). Click the “Yes, I want more traffic” CTA button.
ii). Second step: Analyze the data – As you continually put out valuable content, you’ll be surprised how your lead generation and sales will improve.
You can also use QuickSprout to determine the Estimated Traffic Score, SEO score, bill score and social networks share score of competitive sites.
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.
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:
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
There are a lot of APIs you can feed data to, but some are better than others. Today I want to share with you my favorite SEO tools for competitor analysis. Now, I’m not saying that this is the only list you need to get started with competitor analysis or for that matter, just that these are my favorites.