14 Best SEO Competitor Analysis Tools to Explore in 2020

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 SEO tools you can use to monitor your competitors’ SEO activity online. Make sure to have these tools at hand to get an edge in this digital war.

14 best SEO competitor analysis tools you should explore

1. OnPage Champ

OnPage Champ provides important competitor on-page SEO elements, 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 with in OnPage Champ assist you in saving time while carrying an analysis of competitors’ websites and to get actionable insights.

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2. SpyFu

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.

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3. SEMRush

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.

Check out this video to learn more about SEMRush.

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4. Ahrefs

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 (within Ahrefs) 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.

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5. SimilarWeb

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.

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6. Siteliner

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.

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7. BuzzSumo

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.

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8. Brightedge

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.

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9. Ispionage

If you want to know about the top ranking keywords of your competitors, then Ispionage is the tool for you.

This tool gives you in-depth data around SEO and PPC keywords of your competitors.

It provides you with data around search volume, average position, CPC, keyword difficulty, etc. And you can check this data not only for Google but also Bing/Yahoo! results.

You can know about your competitors’ advertising campaign as well, i.e, you can analyze their landing pages, know about their PPC ads, and target audiences.

This can help you understand your competitors’ strategy and implement the best for you.

Besides all this, the tool informs you about the approximate ad and PPC budget of your competitors.

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10. Monitor backlinks

Monitor backlinks is an excellent tool for backlinks analysis, despite being younger than most of the industry players.

It brings data from Moz, Majestic, AuthorityLabs, and also from their search crawlers.

It provides you with an in-depth analysis of backlinks of any website, whether it’s yours or your competitors.

You can use this analysis to your advantage, i.e, once you know which websites are linking back to your competitors, you can target the same website for your link building strategy.

Besides this, the tool tells you about the quality of the backlinks which will help you discover bad backlinks faster.

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11. Alexa

Alexa is an SEO tool that helps you analyse traffic for your website and your competitors.

It helps to unearth data around various critical elements such as traffic sources, monthly searches, competitors’ keyword analysis, audience insights, etc.

The tool analyses this data to provide you with insights that can help you optimize your website, increase its online visibility, and rank higher in search engines.

Also, you can track ranks for the websites as well.

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12. Rank Signals

It is a free tool that helps you check backlinks pointing at your website or your competitors’ website.

It provides you with information regarding link signals like PageRank, Alexa Rank, Internal and External links ratio, and also tells about whether a link is dofollow or nofollow.

Apart from this, you can also find broken and toxic links pointing to your website and take necessary actions to remove such links.

RankSignals also brings the anchor text of a given backlink and shows the social media metrics of any website that you enter.

All this information can help you build a solid link building strategy.

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13. Quantcast

Quantcast tells you about your audience in detail. It provides you with various reports that talk about the interests of your audience, the demographics, buying habits, the websites your audience is viewing, conversion levels, etc.

They determine the behavioral pattern of the audience through statistical modeling.

This information can help you in building a new user acquisition strategy and improving content marketing strategy as well.

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14. WhatRunsWhere

WhatRunsWhere is an advertising tool that analyses the ads run by competitors.

It provides in-depth reports of the ad campaigns that can help you understand their advertising strategy.

Now, based on this, you can either follow the same strategy or implement a new one by taking in a good few points from their strategy.

This tool will make sure that every dollar that you ought to spend on advertising is fruitful.

It’s a costly tool and is targeted towards enterprises.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

#1. What is SEO competitor analysis?
SEO competitor analysis refers to knowing how the top ranking pages have optimized multiple aspects of their SEO, be it onpage or off page.

#2. Why do we do SEO competitor analysis?
It helps us understand the content, keywords, ranking positions etc. of our competitors. This can unveil the SEO strategy & execution practices of the competitors.
Basis this analysis, you can either adapt to those strategies and fuel your SEO growth or find faults in it and come out with a better strategy to zoom ahead of your competitors.

#3. Which SEO tools can you run competitor analysis?
Here’s a list of the best SEO competitor analysis tools:
1. OnPage Champ
2. SpyFu
3. SEMRush
4. Ahrefs
5. SimilarWeb
6. Siteliner
7. BuzzSumo
8. Brightedge
9. Ispionage
10. Monitor backlinks

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It’s time to get started

You can use a combination of some or all of these SEO tools as per your requirement. 

These tools help you identify the areas where your competitors are tasting success and the reasons behind that. 

These 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 competitor analysis tools is experienced only if you have content that can fuel your SEO.