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Are you struggling to keep up with your competitors and match their success rate? Competitor analysis tools enable you to monitor, assess, and draw insights from your competitors’ tactics. This knowledge can supercharge your marketing campaigns and help you win!
With so many competitor analysis tools available, finding the perfect fit for your brand can be a challenge. No worries, though. I’ve done the research for you and compiled a list of the top 10 to help you make the right choice.
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10 Best SEO Competitor Analysis Tools
- Semrush – Best Keyword Research Tool Overall
- Loganix – Best for Link Building
- SE Ranking – Best All-in-One Software
- Mangools – Best for Affordability
- Serpstat – Best Keyword Suggestion Tool
- Rank Math – Best for Integrations
- Owletter – Best for email campaign analysis
- Sprout Social – Best for social listening
- Majestic – Best for Backlink Analysis
- Screaming Frog – Best as a Supplementary Tool
Semrush is a versatile SEO tool and can handle virtually any SEO task, making it ideal for those seeking competitor insights beyond just blog content. Imagine it as a web presence at Costco—offering everything you could ever need in bulk quantities.
Chase Koches, the director of operations at Currier Marketing, leverages Semrush for everything from social listening to content analysis and market intelligence. Here’s how Koches uses it to cover all the bases:
- “Social media listening: By linking your social account with Semrush, you can easily compare your progress to your competitors’.
- SEO/content analysis: Semrush provides comprehensive tools to identify keyword gaps between you and your competitors, streamlining the development of your content strategy.
- Market intelligence: Semrush helps analyze link profiles and backlinks compared to competitors. It also lets you review your competitors’ advertising tactics to understand their strategies.
Semrush offers valuable tools to execute each of these tasks. Want insights into competitors’ social media? The Social Media Tracker analyzes their content, so you can learn what works for them. Need SEO insights? Semrush offers many tools like Backlink Gap, which helps you generate content ideas based on competitors’ successes.
Interested in market data? Market Explorer provides insights into competitors’ market share, size, and opportunities, while EyeOn offers continuous monitoring.
While Semrush might not be as specialized as other products mentioned here (like Ahrefs and Sprout Social for content analysis and social listening), it’s a powerful, all-in-one solution that’s reasonably priced.
- Extensive suite of powerful analytics tools
- Market Explorer provides competitor market data
- Can substitute several standalone products
- Not as specialized as some tools for specific tasks
Loganix has built a strong reputation in digital marketing, recognized for its comprehensive SEO and marketing services that drive visibility and growth for businesses. One key aspect of search engine optimization is understanding how you measure up against competitors. This is where Loganix’s SEO Competitor Analysis Tool excels.
The tool offers a detailed view of your competition’s strategies, enabling you to refine your own approach and gain a larger share of the online market. By uncovering what your competitors are excelling at and where they fall short, you can position your business for greater success.
Content Gap Analysis: This powerful feature identifies content topics your competitors cover that you haven’t explored yet. The tool provides actionable insights on how to fill these gaps with high-quality content that resonates with your target audience, boosting your website’s authority and relevance.
- High-quality services
- Always meets deadlines
- Courteous customer service
- Reasonable prices for all services
- Effective link-building service
- Recommended by SEO experts and large organizations
- Email autoresponder automation through third-party integration
- Affiliate system available
- Stylish dashboard design
- Link-building services can be more expensive than competitors
- Service delivery can sometimes be slow
- Response rates may be low
SE Ranking is an all-in-one SEO platform that consolidates SEO and marketing data in a single interface. It offers comprehensive insights into a website’s on-page SEO health, along with tools for keyword research, backlink tracking, content management, competitor analysis, marketing strategy, and more.
The competitor analysis toolkit offers a detailed examination of competitor websites, providing insights into both organic and paid strategies. Key features of SE Ranking’s competitor analysis tool include:
- A dynamic overview of competitors’ organic and paid traffic, showing monthly click estimates, top keywords, and traffic costs.
- Detailed data on competitors’ keywords, including rankings, updated stats, keyword difficulty, search volume, and CPC.
- A comprehensive summary of competitors’ backlink profiles, including backlink quality, domain lists, backlink gaps, and monthly trends.
- In-depth analysis of competitors’ top-performing ads, along with monthly ad histories and breakdowns of Google Ads campaigns.
- Multiple comparison features to understand traffic distribution, identify new competitors, and uncover keyword overlaps and gaps.
- Comprehensive feature set
- Intuitive and user-friendly interface
- Budget-friendly plans for smaller businesses
- Lead generator feature provides valuable lead magnets
- Doesn’t offer as much data or coverage as some leading platforms
- Local SEO data isn’t its strong suit
The aim of SERP analysis is to assess the relevance of keywords and gauge your potential to outrank competitors.
What if you could benchmark your website against the top-ranking URLs? That’s why Mangools developed a user-friendly feature that lets you swiftly compare your website to any of your competitors. This is useful if your URL isn’t currently ranking on the search results page you’re analyzing.
You can find the comparison tool at the bottom of the app. Enter your URL and click the “Compare” button. The selected metrics will load quickly, allowing you to compare them with other results.
- Exceptional UI/UX
- Budget-friendly
- High-quality and unique SEO tools
- Extensive and reliable link index
- Not always consistently reliable
Serpstat is a comprehensive SEO platform that evaluates your website and your competitors’. Use it to uncover competitors’ keywords, assess their pages and backlink strategies, and track their rankings in search results.
Features include:
- Keyword research – Compare keywords, find semantic variations, and identify long-tail keywords
- Search analytics – Monitor domain and keyword rankings and discover which posts drive the most traffic
- Content marketing ideation – Benchmark your content to better target your industry
- Competitor research – Compare your business to the competition
- Market intelligence – Track industry leaders to enhance your SEO and PPC strategies
- Backlink analysis – Monitor competitors’ backlinks and score referring domains
Serpstat offers a free trial, but with limited queries. Paid plans offer broader data access. If you’re having trouble scaling up your content marketing due to inconsistent results, check out the Serpstat webinar by The Blogsmith’s Founder, Maddy Osman, for insights on creating style guidelines that meet both human and bot needs.
- Comprehensive SEO ranking tool
- Affordable pricing
- Easy to use
- Free trial available
- Audit explanations can be technical and challenging to understand
- SEO reports are limited and lack customization options
Founded by MyThemeShop in 2018, the Rank Math SEO plugin has seen exponential growth, with over 2 million active installations. It is now one of the leading SEO plugins for WordPress. Rank Math PRO users can directly access the SEO Analyzer from their WordPress dashboard, while non-PRO users can use the free SEO Analyzer tool. Simply input your competitor’s URL into the provided field and click “ANALYZE.”
In Rank Math’s Common Keywords section, you’ll find the most frequently used keywords on your competitor’s page. These are the keywords that search engines use to determine the intent of your competitor’s site. Optimizing your page for these keywords could be beneficial.
- Seamless migration from your previous SEO plugin without losing your settings
- Free option available
- Lightweight design
- Integration with popular tools like Google Analytics
- Compatibility with popular page builders like Elementor and Divi
- Competitive pricing
- Pre-installed settings
- Excellent customer support
- Instant indexing to boost website rankings
- FAQ and Table of Contents don’t work with the Classic Editor
- Limited AI credits
- Numerous features may go unnoticed during installation
There’s an aspect of competitor analysis I haven’t touched on yet: software names inspired by owls. And email marketing. Owletter seamlessly combines both.
Owletter is a specialized platform for analyzing competitor email campaigns, and it can be a valuable tool for companies that rely on email outreach. Once you’ve set up your competitors, the software gathers screenshots of all their mailing list emails (which makes it more like a net than an owl, if you think about it, though “Netter” must have been taken).
As you build a collection of your competitors’ marketing communications, Owletter tracks and analyzes them. It allows you to gather and sort these emails to monitor competitors’ strategies and replicate what works. You can even set up keyword alerts to notify you when specific terms that apply to your business are mentioned.
As someone with substantial experience in email marketing, I know that designing campaigns often involves more guesswork than strategy. Owletter helps you eliminate the guesswork by showing you what successful companies do. You can use it to monitor campaign metrics such as spam status, send times and days, frequency, and seasonality.
The pricing is affordable, though the monthly summary, single alert, and one-year storage might be restrictive for Starter-tier users. Owletter is a unique tool that provides email marketers with invaluable insights.
- Automatically captures and organizes competitor email campaigns
- Offers unique competitor email analytics and trend graphs
- Custom keyword alerts
- The lowest tier has limited features
- Doesn’t provide private insights into metrics like open rates
Choosing not to go with Sprout Social for this recognition was challenging. Marketing professionals like Simon Bacher, CEO and co-founder of Ling, consider it the go-to software for social media listening.
“Sprout Social,” Simon says, “allows us to monitor brand mentions, hashtags, keywords, and more across various platforms. It helps us understand how consumers view our brand and competitors’ brands.” Sprout Social leverages AI to collect and analyze competitor data, providing actionable insights on what works for them what doesn’t, and how you can fill those gaps with your content.
With Sprout Social, you can see what your competitors are sharing and how users perceive them and analyze sentiment trends. You can find real-time opportunities to learn from competitors by monitoring conversations around predefined topics and queries.
One of Sprout Social’s standout features is its deep integration of AI within the software. It taps into a decade of historical data to offer rich sentiment analysis, spotting trends and behaviors. By understanding competitor performance metrics like audience sentiment, engagement, and share of voice, you can use AI to generate content ideas, craft engaging posts, respond to users, and automate repetitive tasks.
While Sprout Social carries a premium price tag, it’s worth the investment for companies that heavily rely on social media.
- Accessible market data, segmented by use case
- Reliable and dynamic data sources
- User-friendly interface
- Limited access to granular or niche data
Unlike other tools that position themselves as comprehensive SEO solutions, Majestic focuses solely on backlinks, and it excels at this specialization.
Majestic offers metrics like Trust Flow (backlink quality) and Citation Flow (backlink quantity) to evaluate your competitor’s backlinks. While Citation Flow has equivalents in other tools (like Domain Authority in Moz and Domain Rating in Ahrefs), Trust Flow is exclusive to Majestic.
With Majestic, you don’t need to search for quality backlinks among the sea of backlinks manually. Instead, you can simply check your competitors’ Trust Flow metrics to see where you stand in the backlink competition. A higher Trust Flow often indicates a greater likelihood of attracting high-quality backlinks.
Majestic’s unique feature, Topical Trust Flow, measures the number of backlinks you receive from websites in various niches. Since backlinks play a crucial role in search engine algorithms, receiving more backlinks from similar niches could influence how search engines perceive your site.
Topical Trust Flow may help establish you as an authority in the eyes of search engines. You can access other backlink-related tools that Ahrefs and Semrush offer, such as anchor text analysis and link context.
- Analyzes backlink data for multiple URLs at once
- Provides two distinct indexes for a given URL: historic (past backlink data) and fresh (most up-to-date)
- Measures the quality and quantity of backlinks for you and your competitors
- Offers a side-by-side comparison of the link profiles of two websites
- Unintuitive interface
- Expensive plans
- No free plan
Screaming Frog specializes in website analysis and technical SEO, providing a comprehensive snapshot of a website’s technical health. It enables you to analyze how your successful competitors are optimizing their page titles and meta descriptions for various keywords.
Though the Screaming Frog interface can seem overwhelming, it offers unique insights that are hard to find elsewhere. For instance, if you want to understand a competitor’s internal linking strategy, you can select a few URLs and check the Inlinks tab.
Here, you can identify where internal links are placed and the anchor text used. From the screenshot, the competitor appears to use anchor text that describes the linked article rather than generic phrases like “learn more” or “click here” in their internal link-building strategy.
And there’s even more that Screaming Frog offers. If you want to gain insights from a competitor’s content marketing team after months or years of content creation, head to the Content tab to identify patterns you can replicate.
- Comprehensive audits
- Flexible and customizable
- Regular updates and support
- Data extraction capabilities
- Local SEO audits
- Complexity for beginners
- Resource-intensive
- No cloud version
- Limited free version
Best SEO Competitor Analysis Tool – Buyer’s Guide
What Is Competitor Analysis?
Competitor analysis involves identifying and evaluating your industry’s rivals, their strengths, weaknesses, and how they stack up against your business.
Consider the level of brand awareness your competitors have compared to your own. Discover their pricing, financial reports, share prices, customer service practices, company culture, and distribution strategies.
Use these insights to refine your brand’s marketing strategy and gain an edge over competitors.
For more information, read the guide “How to Conduct a Competitor Analysis.” It’s recommended by experts and offers a comprehensive understanding of competitor analysis’s what, why, and how.
Why Do Competitor Tracking?
Tracking competitors helps refine your marketing strategy and find market gaps others have overlooked. It also reveals successful opportunities your competitors capitalize on that you might have missed, like emerging markets.
Choosing the Right Competitor Analysis Tool
“Competitor analysis” is a broad term, so I’ve categorized these software options based on the key elements of competitive market analysis:
- Social media monitoring: Tools to track competitors’ social media performance, such as engagement rates, followers, and mentions.
- SEO analysis: Software to monitor competitors’ web presence and content marketing performance.
- Direct marketing: Applications for reporting on competitors’ email, SMS, and advertising campaigns.
- Competitor intelligence: Platforms to access competitors’ financial data, historical performance, and market positioning.
Most of these tools fall into SEO and competitor intelligence categories, which usually have the most significant impact on business objectives. Despite their differences, these tools share a few common traits:
- Comparison capabilities: Tools designed to identify and analyze competitor data to inform business decisions.
- Novel insights: Reporting that offers useful insights into competitors that aren’t readily available.
- Sales/marketing use case: Insights should impact sales or marketing channels.
- Ease of use: The tool should be user-friendly with a dynamic yet accessible interface.
Other Types of Competitor Analysis Tools
In addition to SEO tools, several others can help you monitor your competitors, such as:
- Social media management tools
- Social media monitoring and listening tools
- Analytics tools
- AI-driven tools
- Content analysis tools
- Video monitoring tools
- Email and ad monitoring tools
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Best SEO Competitor Analysis Tool – FAQs
Bottom Line
Each competitor analysis tool I’ve mentioned has a specific use case, so the right choice depends on what you need to learn about your competitors, how you’ll use the information, and your budget.
These tools fall into four main categories: social media monitoring, SEO analysis, direct marketing, and competitor intelligence. You can’t go wrong with any of them. And whichever one you choose, remember that you can unlock even more potential by automating your competitor analysis.
