Top 10 SEO Competitor Analysis Tools to Help You Come Out on Top
Falling behind your competitors in SEO and marketing means falling behind in customers and, ultimately, sales.
But if you know your competitors’ marketing strategies, you can take advantage of their weaknesses—and find new opportunities for yourself.
SEO competitor analysis is one area where business owners can build the most momentum and advance the quickest.
But, it’s also one of the most difficult to master and utilize to your advantage.
That’s why it should be a top priority for all business owners with an online presence to invest in SEO competitor analysis tools to stay one step ahead of the competition.
Monitoring and analyzing your competitors’ SEO ranges from their backlinks to keywords to web traffic and more.
So, in this article, we’ll focus on a selection of tools that you can use to stay informed about every aspect of your competitors’ online marketing.
Let’s take a look at our top 10 list—in no particular order—of SEO competitor analysis tools that’ll give you a competitive edge and take your marketing and sales to the next level.
Top 10 SEO Competitor Analysis Tools to Help You Come Out on Top
Monitor Backlinks
Monitor Backlinks is a must-have if you want your backlink campaign to advance to the next level.
With this tool, you can take care of your own backlink profile while taking advantage of your competitors’ good backlinks to bring yourself more business.
Not only can you monitor all of your own links in real time, and get notified to any changes:
But you can also monitor your competitors’ backlinks, and see exactly where they’re getting all their links from.
If anything changes to either yours or your competitors’ backlinks, such as gaining a new link or losing one, Monitor Backlinks sends you a notification so you can check it out right away.
This makes it easy to beat out your competitors. When they get a new backlink that adds to their SEO value, you can go after it yourself. When they lose a good backlink, you can swoop in and steal it.
With this tool, you’ll always know exactly where your competitors stand in comparison with your own link building strategy and you can make the necessary changes to boost your ranking.
Starting at just $21.67 a month to monitor one domain and two competitors, Monitor Backlink’s pricing is one of the most intriguing parts of the entire service. The affordability on top of the incredible SEO boost make it a tool worth checking out.
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is a comprehensive, general competitor analysis tool that gives you detailed metrics on loads of different aspects concerning any website or application out there. That includes things like traffic metrics, traffic sources, popular pages and audience analysis.
These important areas can be the difference between success and failure in the highly competitive realm of online marketing.
There are several different services on offer from SimilarWeb that allow you to fully analyze any competitors’ marketing strategies and adjust yours accordingly.
They also allow you to analyze the industry as a whole to set benchmarks for different aspects of web performance like load times and traffic metrics to see how you stack up against the industry average.
With the website comparison tool, you can compare your own website to a competitor’s and get an in-depth report about their marketing, website and audience.
You’ll also get access to their website funnel, their traffic stats and sources, popular pages and SEO keyword analytics.
With this array of tools, you can rest assured that you’ll know your competitors inside and out.
The well-organized dashboard allows you to navigate quickly and easily between the different levels of analysis and discover the necessary information for your purposes. The navigation bar on the left side lists all the different types of analysis, but you can easily scroll through the information as well.
In addition to all of that, SimilarWeb offers both a free and a paid option that’s customized to your needs.
SEMrush
With SEMrush, SEO and SEM analysis becomes a breeze.
To truly understand your competitors’ behavior, you must understand their SEO campaigns in conjunction with the other aspects of their marketing. SEMrush allows you to do just that and more.
With their comprehensive repertoire of tools, you can easily track and analyze competitor SEO, backlinks, keywords, traffic and advertising campaigns—all in one place.
Having all that information at your fingertips means you can easily find areas where your site is lacking and boost your strengths to take advantage of weak spots in your competitor’s strategy.
The SEMrush dashboard is jam-packed with well-organized information that displays things like your keyword analysis, backlink usage, traffic metrics and advertising in a convenient format.
All the analytics are conveniently placed in a navigation bar on the left-hand side of the screen. This organization makes it easy to access and use the in-depth analytics that SEMrush provides you with.
SEMrush has flexible pricing options as well depending on the size of your business, starting at $99 per month.
Kompyte
While Kompyte offers many services to give you a leg up on your competitors, their main focus lies in website changes that could affect your business.
With real-time monitoring, you’ll know right away when any competitor has made an important change to their website that can impact their SEO—the report will be waiting for you on your Kompyte dashboard.
The tool monitors the code of your competitor’s website in order to know if they’re making performance enhancements that could drive more traffic to their website. Sneaky.
In addition to their great monitoring tools, Kompyte also offers some other incredible competitor analysis tools.
The competitor detector, for example, picks up on when a new competitor has entered your market by tracking new bids for your keywords, and the search ads alert notifies you every time a competitor launches a new AdWords campaign.
You can also easily monitor social media presence, SEO rank, search ads, and content and blog analytics. This helps you stay on top of every aspect of your competitors’ online marketing, which means you get to stay one step ahead.
Kompyte offers three pricing packages—though you’ll have to register for a trial to get specific pricing information.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is one of the most interesting competitor analysis tools because it deals specifically in how customers interact with the content on your page and in what ways.
With BuzzSumo’s powerful tools, you can analyze what content works for your competitors and what helps boost their client base, which will allow you to get inspiration or change your practices accordingly.
A second aspect of their competitor analysis is that you can view who has shared which parts of the page, which can help you identify influencers that your competitors may be using to boost their content reach.
You can also compare competitors against each other:
And you can set up monitoring that lets you practically spy on your competitor’s content strategy. You’ll get a notification every time your competitor posts any type of content that’s relevant to you.
BuzzSumo pricing starts at $99 a month for unlimited searches, five alerts and 5,000 mentions.
Alexa
Alexa offers several different competitor analysis tools to help you close the gap between you and your competition.
The first of these is the Audience Overlap tool, which monitors your audience group to seek out new competitors as well as potential influencers that you can use to boost your web presence. You can also compare up to 10 competitor sites side by side to see who’s dominating in your industry.
Other tools in the package allow you to monitor traffic, backlinks and keywords, with a specific focus on helping you analyze and adapt according to the specific strategies that your competitors are using.
For example, the Competitor Keyword Matrix works with the Audience Overlap tool to find common keywords for your top 10 competitors, and identify gaps that you can fill.
Alexa pricing starts at $99 a month for the Essentials package and goes up to $299 for the Agency package.
iSpionage
iSpionage is appropriately named, because its entire purpose revolves around stealing your competitors’ traffic by analyzing their SEO, conversion strategy and other detailed aspects of their online presence.
With iSpionage, you can keep careful watch on your opponents’ strategies and execution by uncovering their most profitable keywords. The tool tracks your competitor’s keywords and orders them by frequency, and therefore, profitability.
You can then target these most profitable keywords yourself to potentially steal your competitor’s traffic, and maximize your own profitability a significant amount.
The dashboard presents all the hidden data about your competitors that’ll help you beat them in traffic and sales by using better keywords, including both organic and PPC keywords, how much they’re spending on AdWords, and more.
Finally, iSpionage also monitors your opponents and lets you know when they add keywords, add to or make changes to their current ads, or see a change in organic SEO rank.
iSpionage starts at $29 a month for the basic plan and goes all the way up to $299 a month for the advanced plan, designed for agencies and large businesses.
Brandwatch
The way in which Brandwatch can be used for competitor analysis is interesting and quite different from any of the other tools on this list because they allow you to monitor exactly what people are saying about your brand and about your competitors online.
You just set Brandwatch to monitor your industry, then compare customer conversations to improve your customer relations while your competitors lag behind.
The purpose of Brandwatch is to help you understand people and use that understanding to grow your business through smarter advertising.
To do this, they analyze social media from around the globe for the keywords that you specify and break them down into categories that are easy to sort through.
The dashboard shows a comparison of the major keywords and a timeline of their mentions, which allows you to quickly and easily analyze how your brand is being talked about online.
By comparing this analysis with your competitor’s, you can be fully aware of how customers are interacting with the industry as a whole and spot any areas where you need to improve.
Filters allow you to categorize mentions online so that you can zoom in on certain things.
If you’re concerned about negative comments, you can use the negative sentiment filter. If you want to look at comments in Spanish, you can change the language filter. Using filters to analyze your competitors in specific areas gives you the capability to target very specific aspects of their business.
By using Brandwatch to compare your customers’ conversations with those of your competitors’ customers’ conversations, you can understand the market better as a whole, which gives you incredibly valuable information about how to beat your competitors and convert their customers.
For pricing information, you’ll need to book a demo with a representative who can quote you for your specific needs.
SpyFu
SpyFu is a very simple tool that gives you access to all your competitors’ keywords and related information, which you can download as a PDF for close analysis.
Using the information that they find about ads, keywords and traffic, you’ll be better informed and able to make better decisions about how to advertise and use SEO.
The website’s layout is simple, easy to use and easy to learn from. You simply type in the name of your competitor and click enter.
This beautiful dashboard comes up with all the information you could ever need about your competitors’ keywords and page metrics. That includes their organic keywords, SEO rankings and clicks, how they stack up against other competitors in the industry, a timeline of traffic, and information about their AdWords campaigns.
SpyFu is simple, but with this incredibly valuable information, you can know your competitor’s website as well as you know your own. You’ll know their strong points and their weak ones, which will allow you to utilize them to strengthen your own online presence and beat them out for the top spots.
You can even download their keywords and follow SpyFu’s “Top Adwords Buy Recommendations” to pinpoint the most profitable areas to target.
Pricing for SpyFu starts at $33 per month billed annually, and the most comprehensive plan is $199 per month.
Serpstat
Not sure who your competitors are yet? Serpstat is a great place to start.
Just type in your URL to get a list of your top competitors as well as tons of valuable information about how to beat them.
You’ll get SEO metrics, common keywords, relevance, changes in keywords and traffic, and many other important data points.
You can do a side-by-side comparison of your website and your competitor’s to compare your keywords, SEO performance and other important aspects like backlinks, traffic and volume details that could be the difference between profiting and going out of business.
The dashboard is very well organized and easy to use, so you can easily gauge your own effectiveness and compare it with that of your competition.
There are many valuable features to explore from the left menu that’ll prove invaluable for diagnosing and fixing problems with your SEO, your backlinks, keywords and other important data points for increasing web traffic.
Serpstat’s basic plan is $19 per month. The highest plan goes up to $299 per month, but it’s unlikely that you’ll need all the extra bells and whistles unless you run a large corporation.
Final Words on SEO Competitor Analysis
It’s clear that analyzing and monitoring your competitors constantly and measuring how well you stack up against them is absolutely essential for your business.
If you’re looking for a valuable, easy-to-use and versatile way to monitor and analyze your competition and make an actionable plan for beating them, try using some of the above 10 resources.
They offer the most comprehensive and value-packed plans available and are sure to increase your business’ profitability through better online performance.
Yassir Sahnoun is a content strategist and copywriter who helps SaaS businesses attract more sales using content marketing. You can connect with him by visiting his website.
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