02 Mar
SEO competitor analysis also known as competitive analysis works as a powerful research strategy in helping you to rank higher, get more traffic, and earn more conversions.
There are many ways to do a competitive analysis for SEO, but the basic principle works like this: analyze what’s working for your competition (keywords, content, links, etc.) and leverage this intelligence to improve your own SEO efforts.
What exactly is SEO competitive analysis?
SEO competitive analysis involves researching the links, keywords, content, and more of your SEO competitors in order to reverse-engineer the most successful elements of these tactics into your own SEO strategy.
Instead of guessing which keywords to target, content to create, or links to build, you can instead see what’s already working for others, and build upon that success.
Consider a real-world example: Imagine you operate a grocery store, one of three competing stores in town. Your customers are happy, but you know they also visit other stores because they can’t buy everything in one place. So you go on a road trip to gather competitive intelligence. You visit the other stores to understand the popular items they offer. By offering these items yourself or even superior ones, you help your customers make fewer trips, and in turn, you gain more business.
1. Searchmetrics
SearchMetrics is a comprehensive SEO and content marketing suite for enterprises that allow them to create engaging content and connect with customers in a more effective way. The SEO and Content Experience suite aims to eliminate guess work from the equation by providing deep insights into the market and competitors.
Moreover, the Searchmetrics Suite will still tell you about a site’s position in search, how well a certain domain is ranking in Google, and for what kind of keywords it is ranking for. In particular, searchmetrics has an algorithm that is based on matching sets of keywords without considering any additional metrics.
Searchmetrics has a nice array of organic rankings reports that automatically filters out long-tail keywords by displaying them in a separate tab.
2. SpyFu
SpyFu is a powerful tool that lets you view all data on competitors’ keywords in both organic search and AdWords to get even more related keywords. You just need to add competitors’ keywords and get an overall view of their strategy. SpyFu is around for a while and specializes in providing SEO competitive landscape data.
This is a good tool to research niches, new keywords, and plan tests. SpyFu can also give you a list of competitor names for the domain you’re analyzing when trying to identify your most aggressive competitors. Also, It gives you a comprehensive overview of a domain’s performance such as the distribution of its position on the first page of search results and some other details.
3. iSpionage
iSpionage is one of the spying tools that makes it easy to see what your competitors are doing in organic search. It has a set of tools that includes SEO competitive research, social monitoring, and keyword tracking. Moreover, it supports more search engines including Bing and Yahoo, and covers Google databases like Australia and Canada.
Unlike SpyFu, the list of top organic competitors in iSpionage doesn’t look so well organized. Yet it displays more fine-tuned results than Searchmetric. 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.
4. SEMrush
Semrush is an all-in-one tool suite for improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights. Our tools and reports are able to help marketers that work in the following services: SEO, PPC, SMM, Keyword Research, Competitive Research, PR, Content Marketing, Marketing Insights, Campaign Management. It is the leading SEO software for small and mid-sized businesses.
Another cool feature is that SEMrush’s dashboard displays proportion of branded to non-branded traffic, the number of search queries, and the amount of traffic branded search brings along with how it’s been trending over time. It also shows you what category (or categories) does a domain belong to based on the keywords for which it ranks in Google.
5. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a well-known toolset for backlinks and SEO analysis. It has implemented a set of reports for competitor analysis that shows you a list of competitors based on the number of related keywords. Furthermore, it won’t detect your competitors with precision because Ahrefs doesn’t count in such metrics as the size of a domain or the type of industry a domain belongs to.
Ahrefs has excluded big domains like Quora, Google, and Apple from their results to organize their data and put things in order. If you feel like there is some inconsistency with your keyword strategy, use a Content Gap report. This report allows you to spot the keywords your rivals are visible for but your domain isn’t. Also, Ahrefs Keywords Explorer will help you get relevant keyword ideas and traffic estimations. And the Site Audit tool will analyze your website for common SEO issues & monitor your SEO health over time.
Additionally, the Ahrefs can easily replace several tools and has already become essential for any SEO since it gives you new ideas for link-building and content analysis; social stats and ratings; export of any data for further analysis on your own; various charts and graphs for visual representation and much more.
6. SERPstat
It is a Smart and powerful tool for Backlinks Analysis, Rank Tracking, Keyword Research, Competitor Analysis and Site Audit. It’s slowly evolved from a keyword research tool into a “growth hacking tool” that contains features for link building, technical SEO, PPC and more.
The main dashboard gives you an overview of the most visible pages, which is extremely useful. It will save your time and help you avoid the endless process of exporting organic rankings data and building pivot tables in Excel.
7. BrightEdge
BrightEdge is one of the leading SEO solutions and content performance marketing platforms, that is helping more than 1700 customers generate more organic traffic. This enterprise-level platform offers many great features for keeping an eye on competitors.
For instance, BrightEdge’s SEO X-Ray technology consolidates myriads of keywords in a “Reverse Index” of the web. It reveals which keywords are moving your competitors on top of SERPs and that you should be taking advantage of as well. SEO X-Ray follows the trail of your organic search history and identifies previously unknown competitors so that you can stay alert.
It also lets you analyze your competitors’ SEO campaigns in great detail, along with their recent link strategies, or find which of their single pages drive the most organic traffic.
8. Conductor
Conductor is the world’s leading organic marketing company. Conductor’s technology enables marketers to understand their prospective customers’ intent by revealing the trends and topics they are searching for at every phase of the purchase process. It’s customizable dashboards and workflows guide marketers through the content creation process, empowering them to continuously measure, refine, and demonstrate the effectiveness of their SEO and content marketing efforts.
Their source of keyword data comes from SEMrush. Furthermore, Conductor allows you to view the market share that belongs to a certain brand you’re analyzing by pointing out both its current situation, and estimates its future potential growth. This kind of data can help your clients comprehend their future SEO prospects.
9. SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb provides web analytics services for businesses. The company offers its customers information on their clients’ and competitors’ website traffic volumes, referral sources which include keyword analysis and demographics, and website “stickiness”, as well as other features. It helps you learn exactly how a site attracts traffic.
This tool shows you traffic distribution across all channels (Search, Social, Direct, etc.) and also displays the percentage of search traffic that comes from various search engines. With the help of data, you can tell which keywords should be your priority because they have the potential to bring more traffic to your client’s site.
SimilarWeb also shows you the list of competitors based on what kind of sites are ranking in search engines for the same set of keywords.
10. SEMrush Traffic Analytics
SEMrush Traffic Analytics is a market intelligence and competitive research tool that provides estimations of any website’s desktop and mobile traffic. It can help you benchmark, evaluate a new market or niche, and even build a successful media buying strategy. With Traffic Analytics, you can identify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, evaluate a new market or niche, and even build an effective media buying strategy.
Additionally, SEMrush offers information about traffic distribution across various search engines but unfortunately provides no keyword data. SEMrush Traffic Analytics doesn’t have any data for mobile devices, so for some industries where the volume of online traffic is always high, this data may not be so valuable.
11. Alexa
Alexa allows tracking global web traffic of your own and competitor websites. It is one of those must-have tools that you can use to transform data into competitive value for your business. The Alexa Traffic Rank tool can be easily integrated into your Google Chrome Browser offering you powerful information at the click of a button.
12. Quantcast
Quantcast used to have a product comparable with SimilarWeb, but about a year ago they decided to get rid of their standard solution and switched to custom-made reports that represent unique datasets based on clients’ needs.
This tool can be a good fit for enterprise-level clients who want to see custom-based datasets to further interpret what’s going on in their industry. The reports give you a clear understanding about your audience, help to improve your marketing plans, and make your media campaigns effective.
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. Jumpshot
Jumpshot is a Java-based visualization tool for performing post-mortem performance analysis. It is a promising and overall consistent tool that launched only a couple of years ago. Its data comes from Avast and the data quality is high.
Jumpshot can also shed some light on such intricate data like CTR of a specific button located on your rivals landing page. Not bad for competitive intelligence.
Conclusion
We have discussed the best tools but it’s on you which one to choose. Make sure that any tool you consider has a free trial. It’s important to make sure it works for your team’s specific goals.