In this age of competitive rivalry, you should be aware of your competitors’ digital activity, including what they are doing to their SEO.
Having a clear idea about their content, search rankings, keyword targeting and social buzz can help you decide your digital strategy and changes that may be required.
Here, we have focused on the best tools you can use to monitor your competitors’ activities online. Make sure to have these tools at hand to get an edge in this digital war.
8 Competitor SEO Analysis Tools
1. OnPage Champ
Free Plan Available: Yes Pricing: Starts from USD 14 /month
OnPage Champ provides research on SEO of your competitors in less than 30 seconds. It has functionalities like SEO management, monitoring websites and their ranking, keeping track of ranks, and A/B testing.
All of these features help you understand where your competitors stand and areas for your improvement. It makes tracking of SEO insights for multiple clients as well as competitors extremely user-friendly.
Functionalities like SERP Audit and Track URL available in OnPage Champ assist you in saving time while carrying an analysis of competitors’ websites and to get actionable insights.
2. SpyFu
Free Plan Available: No Pricing: Starts from USD 39 /month
If you want to know which set of keywords are working out for your competitors, SpyFu is your go to tool.
SpyFu’s strength lies in PPC competitor research. It tells you everything that your competitor did while running ads: from their keywords to ads history to negative keywords to ad split tests, and beyond.
This is a useful tool when researching a specialized topic. SpyFlu also provides metrics such as average search volume per keyword, historical usage of keyword for PPC, number of clicks, cost per click, etc.
In all, a highly recommended tool if you focus on Adwords.
3. SEMRush
Free Plan Available: 7 days free trial (but requires credit card info) Pricing: Starts from USD 99 /month
The proportion of marketers who have a documented content strategy is a minority.
You must carry out competitor analysis to dig out hidden opportunities that can fuel your content.
SEMRush is a useful tool to carry out this task. It provides you with features like keyword research, site audit, and most importantly, the analysis of backlinks.
You can run an outreach exercise basis who links to your competition.
Using the Domain Analysis within SEMRush, you can scan your competitors for low difficulty keywords.
4. Ahrefs
Free Plan Available: No Pricing: Starts from USD 99 /month (and 7 day trial for USD 7)
As an alternative to SEMRush, Ahrefs provides functionalities like backlink audits and finding link opportunities. You also get other features like keyword research, tracking of keywords, analyzing organic visibility, and more.
Backlink analysis can help you unearth broken backlinks that point to your competitors, and then executing reach out exercise to get the content linked to your content.
Keyword research helps in analyzing organic keywords and new keywords being used by competitors.
Tools like Content Gap can be used to determine the keywords used by your competitors, but which you are not ranking for. This helps in identifying new keywords, new competitors, and improving the visibility of your content.
5. SimilarWeb
Free Plan Available: Yes Pricing: Custom pricing based on website traffic
SimilarWeb is a tool that helps you understand the traffic characteristics of a particular website.
You can use this tool to know how many unique visitors are flocking competitor sites, their source of traffic, how they are doing on an organic front, and many other parameters.
Multiple competitors can be compared at a time over various characteristics to carry out competitor benchmarking.
These insights can be used to devise your content strategy – whether to focus on organic reach or go for paid search.
You can also tap into new sources of traffic that you are missing out on and check the effectiveness of your marketing channels.
6. Siteliner
Free Plan Available: Yes Pricing: Not Applicable
Siteliner comes from the makers of CopyScape and is a 100% free tool to use.
Siteliner can assist you in identifying broken links on any website and using this opportunity to your advantage.
There is a high correlation between the number of backlinks that a page has, and the Google search position that it ranks for.
If the content on your page is relevant, you can pitch it against the broken link; after all no web administrator wants bad user experience.
7. BuzzSumo
Free Plan Available: No Pricing: Starts from USD 99 /month
While you work on your digital presence, one area that you can’t ignore is social media.
It is essential to know what’s trending on social media, the surrounding content and how are your top competitors performing.
These insights can then be used to devise a content strategy and outperform your competitors. BuzzSumo is the tool that can help you with it.
BuzzSumo helps you across four zones:- content discovery, content research, finding influencers and monitoring trends.
In short, use BuzzSumo to identify that content that’s rocking the social media, and then create a far better content piece. Additionally, identify the influencers who are interacting with similar content and try to build relationships with them to market your content as well.
8. Brightedge
Free Plan Available: No Pricing: Not disclosed
Brightedge is a tool that can enable you to carry out SEO audit, keyword management, rank tracking, off-page SEO, reporting, and much more for your SEO.
BrightEdge is an enterprise level SEO suite used by Fortune 500 companies and doesn’t come cheap.
As part of its offering, BrightEdge helps you identify the search intent behind queries and identify competitors that rank for specific content topics.
It also helps you across multiple areas of SEO like website audit, keyword management, competitor research, rank tracking, local SEO and so on.
Brightedge can be used to make an initial list of keywords, track high-value keywords, and prioritize based on organic ROI of the keywords. It also provides tools to help you focus on local, global, and mobile-based content performance.
It’s time to get started
You can use a combination of some or all of these tools as per your requirement.
These tools help you identify the areas where your competitors are tasting success and the reasons behind that.
These tools can also help you generate actionable insights to improve your visibility and outpace your competitors.
But above everything else, make sure you are creating content that adds value to your users.
The real benefit of these tools is experienced only if you have content that can fuel your SEO.
