Introduction to Competitor Analysis for SEO Tools
SEMRush is one of the internet’s leading SEO tools, providing a variety of services to help small businesses and marketers reach their goals. It’s a popular tool that is used by thousands of marketers and webmasters from all over the world.
If you are interested in using SEMRush to improve your digital marketing efforts, then you will be pleased to know that there are many features available at your disposal.
In this article, we will review some of the most important features and how they can help you increase your search engine traffic.
What Are The Best SEMrush Features?
As we mentioned above, SEMRush offers a wide range of tools that can help you improve your search engine rankings.
One of the best features is the ability to track keywords and backlinks over time. This will allow you to see what words people are searching for on Google and other search engines so you can optimize your content accordingly. You’ll also get an idea as to whether or not certain keywords have gained popularity recently or if they’ve become less popular due to changes in algorithm updates like Penguin or Panda updates from Google that penalize sites with low-quality backlinks or keyword stuffing techniques by black
Competitor Analysis Seo Tools
Everyone knows to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, you should keep track of your main competitors.
To beat the competition, you should spy on your competitors’ every marketing move. Tracking competitors’ search rankings, content, social mentions, emails, and anything else they do to boost business.
What’s helpful to them can be helpful to you. Here’s how:
SEO Competitor Analysis Tools infographic
There are tons of SEO tools that monitor not only your website performance, but also that of your competitors. The good news? You probably already use them for other stuff.
Instagram Engagement Report 2019
Tools for SEO competitor analysis
For awesome competitive intelligence, add these SEO tools to your marketing stack:
1. 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.
SEO Competitor Analysis
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.
2. SE Ranking – track rankings
SE Ranking helps you monitor competitors’ search rankings on any engines and target regions, up to five projects per website.
You can get detailed reports on main competitors, including data on their average positions, traffic forecast, and website visibility. You can also gather data for the first page of any tracked query and ordered them by visibility.
Competitor Analysis Tools
How to best use SE Ranking: The tool gives brief information on the top 10 websites for each of your queries. If you want to track anything in more detail, add it to the ‘Main Competitors’ tab and track for getting more details.
3. InfiniGraph – watch social media trends
InfiniGraph tracks trends in social media circles. It combines consumer-to-brand interactions in real time and uses targeting to find out what brands and content are popular right now.
With Social Intelligence, you can easily pay attention to the most powerful influencers and content for a successful campaign.
How to best use the tool: InfiniGraph allows tracking social media trends of your competitors in your niche and gets insight into your target audience. InfiniGraph is not social listening (it’s keyword-based Social Intelligence and ranked social activities by the ‘relevance’ factor).
4. Monitor Backlinks – look at backlink profiles
Monitor Backlinks is new to the market, but has already earned a great reputation. You can track various competitors’ backlinks, disclose a bunch of negative backlinks, and find quality ones.
It can help to analyze the backlinks of bloggers and webmasters in your field to build up your own link building strategy, build quality links from your competitors, and write link bait content.
You can also estimate the traffic increase based on keyword positioning and efforts to boost good backlinks to a certain website.
monitor backlinks
How to best use Monitor Backlinks: You can easily check out new links from your competitors, analyze good and bad links, get an overall SEO snapshot, compare the results, and build up a new marketing strategy.
5. 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.
SEO Tools
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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
SEO Analysis
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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
tools for SEO
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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
seo tools
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.
13. 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.
14. 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.
content marketing seo
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.
15. [Editor’s Pick!] Mention – find real-time links and coverage
Okay, you caught us sneaking ourselves in here.
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.
best free competitor analysis tools
We collected a list of the best online software solutions for market analysis and research such as :
free social media competitor analysis tools;
free website, keyword, backlink, and SEO competitor analysis tools;
free PPC competitive analysis software;
website change checkers and others
Today, it is absolutely critical to ensure you’re monitoring your competitors on a daily basis and updating your view of the market shifts.
On our previous posts
50 Best Web Competitive Intelligence Tools and Techniques and
How To Do Competitive Market Research and Analysis? The Guide
we’ve focused on what are the benefits of competitive research and analysis and how to do it effectively.
Here, we will show you the top 25 costless online tools you can use freely to spy your competitors, spot new market trends, and find out what’s working within your niche.
Some of the tools are free by nature and others provide a completely free account with a comprehensive range of free features.
- Crayon Intel Free (free market intelligence tool that monitor competitor’s content and design changes)
Crayon Intel Free screen shot – one of the best free online competitor analysis tools
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
- Talkwalker’s Free Social Search (free social media competitor analysis tool)
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
- SiteAlerts (free keyword, social media, and website competitor analysis tool)
SiteAlerts – competitor monitoring software screen shot
This is one of the most easiest to use and completely free online competitor analysis tools that answer many questions such as:
How much traffic do your competitors get? Where does the traffic come from? What software tools do they use? What keywords do they rank for? Is social media working for them?
SiteAlerts is a simple but very useful keyword, social media, and website competitor analysis tool that will provide you with a lot of marketing stats about your competitors as well as the technology they use.
Free options: a free account with a good range of features and paid accounts
- VisualPing (free website change checker)
VisualPing – free online website checker screen shot
Do you want to monitor seamlessly your competitor’s websites changes at no cost? If so, VisualPing can be your solution.
It get you notified on each visual change of a website or website area.
Thus, you can be alerted every time when your competitor update prices, publish news or other important information to users.
Visualping is one of the most easiest to use free website change checkers.
Free options: free account with 62 checks/month and premium accounts
- WhatRuns (discover what technology drives your competitor’s website at no cost)
WhatRuns is a free technology lookup tool that will show you what technologies are used on any website.
Actually, this is a free browser extension that shows you the technologies used on your rival’s website at the click of a button.
WhatRuns shows you almost everything that a website has. Web apps they pay for, CDN they’re hosted on, WordPress plugins, fonts – and much more info!
Also, the tool notifies you when a website starts or stop using a technology.
Free options: only free
- Rank Signals (free keyword, backlink, and SEO competitor analysis tool)
Rank Signals – keyword, backlink and SEO competitor analysis tool
Rank Signals is one of the greatest free online competitor analysis tools that allows you to discover SEO backlinks and traffic sources of your competitors.
You might know how important backlinks are for a good SEO strategy.
Rank Signal helps you identify your competitors best links and evaluate the quality and value of the links.
If you searching for a solid basis for a link building strategy, don’t hesitate to use this tool.
Free options: only free
- Moat (free tool for analyzing your competitors’ ad creative)
Moat – free online tool for analyzing your competitors ad creative
Moat is an awesome free online marketing analysis tool that act as digital-ad search engine. It shows you the competitor’s ad creative and campaigns.
Simply type in the online field a brand and you will see the ads that they are using.
It also displays the dimensions of the ad and the dates during which the ad was (is) active.
You can follow your competitors’ brands and get notified every time they publish a new ad.
Free options: a free account that work great and a PRO oprion
- SimilarWeb (free online tool for analyzing your competitor’s web rankings)
SimilarWeb – a free online tool for analyzing your competitor’s web rankings
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
- Feedly (free news aggregator site for tracking competitors’ news and mentions)
Feedly – free online news aggregator site
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
- Open Link Profiler (free SEO and backlink competitor analysis tool)
Open Link Profiler – a free SEO and backlink competitor analysis tool
OpenLinkProfiler.org is an awsome free online SEO and backlink competitor analysis tool that enables you to check the backlinks of any website.
You get an immediate link analysis of any website you want. You can export 1,000 links per website for free (more in paid versions).
You can also use a Link Manager for free and get notifications about new links by email.
Open Link Profiler is an online marketing analytics software tool that works great for those who aim to get higher rankings on search engines such as Google and Bing.
Free options: a free account that allows you to export 1000 links per website and premium versions
- Website Grader (a free online website competitor analysis tool)
Website Grader from Hubspot is a very cool tool that will provide you with instant insights on your competitors’ overall score based on website’s performance and SEO activity.
The tool also give you information about how well is optimized your competitor’s websites for mobile.
You can also see how good are your competitor websites’ page titles, headings, and meta descriptions.
Free options: only free to use
- BuiltWith (a free website profiler for insights on your competitor’s marketing strategies)
BuiltWith – a free website profiler for insights on your competitor’s marketing strategies
BuiltWith is one of the best free online competitor analysis tools that provides technology information for any website you want to check.
It helps you find out what technology are used for building your competitor’s website, in order to get leads, marketing intelligence, and analysis.
Fill in a competitor’s website and instantly see what software systems they use. This gives you powerful insights on their marketing strategies.
BuiltWith answer questions such as: “What content management system are your competitors using?”, “What are they tracking?”, “What plugins are installed on their website?”
Free options: BuiltWith is completely free to use for individual site lookups.
- Majestic (free backlink and SEO competitor analysis tool)
Majestic is an online SEO competitor analysis tool that specializes in backlinks. It provides you with a depth of backlink data for your competitor’s website.
Majestic is a very easy to setup web-based software. First, you need to register for a free account to get the insights.
After logging in, you can begin using Majestic immediately.
The free version will show you information about the number of links to your competitor’s URL, the number of of links to the domain, the number of domains that link to the URL and to the domain, Citation Flow, Trust Flow, a link profile graph of the citation flow and trust flow, timeline charts, and other.
Free options: free account with a great range of features
- Searchmetrics (free SEO, content marketing, and PPC compatitor analysis tool)
Searchmetrics – one of the best free online competitor analysis tools
Searchmetrics is one of the most powerful free online competitor analysis tools with a lot of functions and options.
It is a web-based SEO and content marketing software solution to help you improve your online presence and research your competitors.
It’s quite easy to jump in and see a lot of types of data for any website you need.
With a free account you can see a lot of SEO data for your competitors such as the top keywords their websites are ranking for, organic vs paid keywords, users by locations, market analysis including your top organic competitors, and more.
Reports are absolutely easy to understand and include PPC competitive analysis and social media competition.
Free options: free account with powerful features and paid versions
- SpyFu (free SEO and keyword competitor analysis tool)
SpyFu – free SEO and keyword competitor analysis tool
When it comes to the most popular free online competitor analysis tools, SpyFu is on the top places and will impress you with its depth and wealth of features.
SpyFu is an SEO tool that allows you to gain a deep insight on your competitor’s keyword campaign.
Its options include keyword spy tools, PPC competitor monitoring, keyword grouper, competitor shared keywords, and much more.
Except keywords, Spyfu also seamlessly tracks backlinks to your competitors websites and their PPC advertising. This is a very comprehensive tool for tracking your competitors and any other website you want.
It can greatly support your online marketing and digital advertising efforts at no cost.
Free options: a free account with several features with data limits and premium accounts
- Wappalyzer (uncover what technology is used on your competitors’ websites at no cost)
Wappalyzer a free online tool for uncovering what technology is used on your competitors’ websites at no cost
Wappalyzer is a simple and absolutely easy to use free online software tool that uncovers the technologies used on websites.
It can shows you the content management systems, ecommerce platforms, server software, analytics tools, and many other technology solutions used in your competitors’ websites.
Moreover, the tool also shows you what are the leading technologies per industry.
Wappalyzer is an open-source platform capable of identifying 1,222 different web technologies.
Free options: only free
- Adbeat (for spying on your competitor’s ad strategies at no cost)
Adbeat – a free tool for spying on your competitor’s ad strategies
If you are searching for free online competitor analysis tools that provide deep insights into the world of digital advertising, Adbeat can be your answer.
It is a different but very useful free solution. You are able to monitor and analyze all the advertisements that your competitors publish.
Adbeat shows you the messaging, creative, placement, size, the number of ads, ad channels, the types of ads, and many other data.
You are able to see the value propositions your competitors are focusing on. And all of these – for free.
Free options: free account with a great range of features and paid accounts
- iSpionage (tool for PPC & SEO competitive Intelligence)
iSpionage – tool for PPC and SEO competitive Intelligence
iSpionage is an online competitor analysis tool that provides valuable PPC and SEO data.
The tool spies on your competitors and shows you what search keywords and advertisement content allow them to attract customers.
Moreover, you’ll be able to discover how much they spend on the paid and organic search, see their landing pages, and uncover their approximate monthly PPC budget.
You can also use this information to discover the top advertisers in your industry.
iSpionage shows you the data with attractive top-notch reports and various types of graphs.
Free options: a free account with a great range of features and paid accounts
- Social Blade (a free social media competitor analysis tool)
Social Blade – a free social media competitor analysis tool
Social Blade is a great completely free tool that tracks user statistics for social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Twitch.
It allows you to gain deeper insights of your competitor’s user growth and trends.
The tool is able to provide you with global analytics for any content creator or brand you want.
Social Blade collect data from channels like Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, Daily Motion, and Instagram and uses these data to create graphs and charts that track progress and growth.
Thus, you can gain very interesting insights for competitors. Social Blade also provides you with a day-by-day follower update as well as a live follower count.
Another great feature is the ability to compere brands’ social presences against each other.
Free options: only free
- Mailcharts (a free email marketing tool for competitive analysis)
Mailcharts – a free email marketing tool for competitive analysis
Mailcharts is a quite powerful tool for email marketers as well as for those who want to spy on competition.
It collects emails from competing campaigns to help you develop your own.
Mailhcharts has an enormous library of emails from countless brands.
It can track and monitor your competitors and their brands to regularly be notified of their activity.
In addition, Mailcharts can compare competitor’s campaigns to your business’ campaigns to let you see where your emails stand.
Moreover, Mailcharts offers a lot of email examples for your inspiration. This way, you can understand what today’s top-performing emails look like.
Free options: a free account that allows you to track 3 companies and paid versions.
- Likealyzer (a free social media competitor analysis tool)
Likealyzer – a free social media competitor analysis tool
If you are searching for comprehensive free online Facebook competitor analysis tools, Likealyzer is a very good solution.
LikeAlyzer will show you an instant health check of any Facebook page.
You can get valuable insights and analytics on your competitors’ Facebook presence by seeing their likes, engagement rate, and PTAT (People Talking About This).
You can also measure responsiveness, posts per day, average post length and other information of multiple competitors to understand where you stand.
Free options: free
- Klear (influencer audit and social media analysis tool)
Klear – an influencer audit and social media analysis tool
Klear is a very cool tool that audits influencer activities on your competitors’ social media accounts.
Thus, you are able to find out influencers and connect with them for your own marketing efforts.
You can search for influencers by skills and location and the tool will generate influencers for you in several categories. This information allows you to determine the quantity and the quality of their followers.
Klear also generates the account’s top content on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Free options: a free plan with limited but powerful features and paid options
- Followerwonk (a free social media research tool)
Followerwonk – a free social media research tool
Followerwonk is a pretty powerful free online tool for learning more about your competitors’ Twitter followers.
The tool allows you to see and analyze your competitors’ followers, the people they follow as well as their overall Twitter actions at no cost.
Also, you can find out the time when your rivals are the most active on Twitter.
Followerwonk uses actionable visualizations to compare your social graph to others.
Using this tool you can analyze and improve your social growth by seeing Twitter analytics. You also can find and connect with new influencers from your market and easily share your reports with your team.
Free options: a free plan and paid options
- Social Searcher (free social media competitor analysis tool)
Social Searcher – a free social media competitor analysis tool
Those who are searching for free social media competitor analysis tools, will be happy to know about this one.
Social Searcher provides you with real-time search on the most popular social media platforms – Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
The tool is super easy to use. You just have to fill the name of your competitors to see who mentioned them, and how often, on the key social media sites.
Practically, you are able to instantly measure and track what people are saying about your or your competitor’s brand, product, services and etc. in one easy to use dashboard.
Free options: free
- Talkwalker Alerts (a free web monitoring tool with results from social media)
Talkwalker Alerts – a free web monitoring tool with results from social media
Talkwalker Alerts allows you to monitor the Internet for new content about your name, competitors, or any other topic you want.
The tool can bring every single mention of your competitors across the Web – from websites, blogs, forums, and even Twitter to your inbox in one email.
Further, there are social media analytics filters that cover the most important conversations so you only receive the alerts that matter for you and can customize your strategy accordingly.
Free options: free
- SEOlium (professional Google rank tracker for SEO)
SEOlium is a new Google rank tracker tool for SEO. You can use it to monitor your market and use the data to better understand and improve your business.
It’s a quite different and powerful tool. Unlike other similar tools, SEOlium produces, own, and fully controls their raw data (Google ranks).
As such, there are no artificial limits (number of projects, competitors, or reports). You have consumption-based pricing.
SEOlium is extremely accurate with superb user-Interface and speed and has many many other great features.
Conclusion
At our web age, when the ways to collect data are critical, you have tons of various factors to take in account when spying on your competitors.
Understanding your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, and strategies is the basis on which to create and develop your business strategy and data driven decision making.
And if you are on a limited budget, there are some pretty powerful free online competitor analysis tools that can provide you with valuable insights.
Conclusion
Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
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