SEO is, by nature, a competition: it’s about ranking higher than your competitor’s websites on Google SERP. So, competitive analysis should be one of, if not the most important aspect of SEO analytics: we should find out why our competitors are outranking us, and act accordingly.
Below are the 6 best tools that can help you in performing SEO competitive analysis so you can plan and execute a better SEO strategy for your software and tech company.
1. SEMRush
Pricing: Starts from $99.95/month, free trial available
SEMRush is a full-fledge SEO suite covering many different elements of SEO analytics. However, in relations to SEO competitive analysis, SEMRush can help in three different areas:
- Keyword analysis: finding out what keywords your competitors are targetting and/or already ranking in, important metrics regarding these keywords (trends, search volume), and how difficult will it be to compete for these keywords.
- Site audit: analyzing your competitor’s site SEO optimization, their traffic sources and audience profile, their marketing efforts (i.e. where they display their advertising), and so on.
- Backlinks profile: pretty self-explanatory, you can analyze the links profile of your competitors. This can be a good way to check for backlinks opportunities, that is, the sites that gave your competitors backlinks can be good sources for your own.
SEMRush is useful both in B2B and B2C environment and is generally a very versatile platform not only for SEO competitive audit, but for any SEO analytics needs in general from finding your target keywords to assessing your site’s current performance to evaluating links profile.
2. SpyFu
Pricing: Starts from $33/month, free trial available
As the name suggests, SpyFu is a dedicated competitor analysis tool with one core function: analyze and provide a comprehensive report of your competitors’ high-performing keywords.
SpyFu can show both organic search keywords—that your competitors are targeting through SEO—, and paid keywords for PPC advertising targeted by your competitors.
In general, here are the steps of using SpyFu to ‘spy’ your competitors:
- Simply enter your competitor’s URL into the search box of SpyFu’s homepage. This will show the target keywords of this competitor’s site. There are different tabs for paid and organic keywords.
- Analyze these keywords (both paid and organic), you can also run these keywords in other SEO tools (i.e. SEMRush as discussed above or do simple Google search).
- You can export these keywords as CSV or PDF for reporting and further analysis needs
SpyFu might only focus on one feature only, but it is very powerful at what it does. Also, you can check the URL for each published ads in the “paid keywords” tab to check how your competitors approach their landing page.
3. Alexa
Pricing: Starts from $79/month, free trial available
Alexa is probably the oldest platform in this list, has been around since 1996, and has since acquired by Amazon (not to be confused with Amazon Alexa, the smart speaker).
So, it is one of the oldest websites in providing analytics and insights to compare the performance of different websites, and provide suggestions on how to optimize our site.
In using Alexa for SEO competitive analysis, simply enter your competitor’s URL to Alexa, and the platform will provide accurate metrics like page views for any period of time, average dwell time on site, unique visits per month, bounce rate, etc.
You can then compare your site’s performance according to these metrics with your competitors. Also, you can compare various metrics related to audience demographics, which can be very useful in SEO to find your target audience and define your target keywords.
4. SimilarWeb
Pricing: Free plan available, contact sales for custom-tailored plan
SimilarWeb is mainly a competitive analysis tool that can analyze any website or app, however, it’s very versatile and yet accurate in providing various insights related to a site from your competitor’s target keywords to tracking your competitor’s media partnerships.
To use SimilarWeb, simply enter your competitor’s brand name in the search bar of SimilarWeb’s home page, and then choose—from the pop-up results— between websites and mobile apps. You will be taken to an overview page, and you can hit the “+ COMPARE” button to add another site (for comparison purposes).
You can then compare the traffic overviews between the two sites (presented with a chart), engagement metrics, and traffic sources. Traffic source is an especially important metric to analyze during competitive analysis: for example, if your competitor drives most of their traffic from organic search, this will mean you’ll have a steep competition in SEO.
5. Siteliner
Pricing: free version available, 1 cents/page for Siteliner Premium
Siteliner is a site analytics platform provided by the creators of Copyscape, the leading plagiarism-detection service, and so Siteliner is focused on analyzing metrics related to the content performance, from broken links detection, text-to-HTML ratio, duplicate content detection, and so on.
Related to SEO competitive analysis purposes, Siteliner is especially useful in checking how your competitors approached their content marketing: number of words per page, text to HTML ratio, page load time, number of external links per page, and so on.
6. Moz Link Explorer
Pricing: free
Previously known as Open Site Explorer, it is a pretty well-known, totally free, and easy to use SEO tool from Moz, one of the most prominent SEO solutions, and is also well known for its blog as one of the best resources for SEO.
Link Explorer is 100% free, and as the name suggests, is focused on analyzing links profile. We can find sites that are linking to your competitors—which can be valuable backlinks sources for our site—, anchor text(s) used, and so on.
End Words
When performing SEO competitive analysis, there are several key aspects to focus on:
- How your competitor is approaching their content marketing (content quality, target keywords, etc.)
- Their backlinks profile, which sites are giving backlinks to your competitors, and why
- Their overall site performance, like page load speed, mobile-responsiveness, and so on.
The six tools we have shared above can help you analyze these three aspects, so you can plan a strategy to outperform your competitors, as well as to find backlinks opportunities.
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Hi, thank you for your article. My team is right now exploring ways to run competitor analysis.
My personal tip is also looking at a review platform like Capterra. There you can see what customers say, love or complain.
Good job!
Ester
I personally have wanted to learn how to be an SEO expert and I am glad to have come across this article just when I needed it. I like that you mentioned SEO is for people who are competitive in nature at the beginning of the article so readers can decide if it is what they really want venture in.
Thank you for sharing your blog. I am going to bookmark this post.
SEO is now focusing heavy on website design. I need a tool to help me improve my website design.
Chris
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Best Tools for Competitor Analytics
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Thank you for sharing 6 Awesome Tools for SEO Competitor Analysis. It is good content. Keep sharing.
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Your blog is a treasure trove for SEO enthusiasts! It’s incredibly helpful, and your insights on competitor analysis tools are gold. As an SEO analyst, I’ve gained valuable knowledge that I’m eager to apply. Your clear explanations make it easy to grasp.
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That’s a great article about competitor analysis tools for SEO. It’s always good to use the right tools to get insight into what your competitors are doing well. These types of tools will definitely give a business, including Zinbay, an opportunity to identify opportunities, hone the strategies, and stay ahead in the competitive SEO environment. With a detailed feature breakdown of each tool, I could easily make out which one fitted my particular needs. Thanks for sharing such a valuable resource!