10 Top Competitor Analysis Tools to Keep a Check on Your Competitors in Digital Marketing
If you want to sustain for long in your niche with profitability, then you must learn to adapt to changes in this competitive world. Ask how you can do it efficiently. One of the key factors to stay updated with the ongoing market trends and developments is keeping a close eye on your leading competitors. By this, we don’t mean to blindly follow their patterns but understand the idea of how they are catching audiences’ attention.
Just think about it.
Whatever industry you are in – Knowing about what your competitors are doing and how they are doing that is as important as anything else. Garnering more followers, generating leads, earning more traffic and conversions – For everything in digital marketing, competitive analysis is critical to stay afloat in the stiff competition around you. This is what business intelligence is all about.
How Do You Start Analyzing Your Competitors?
There are enough tools and software available on the internet that provide assistance in analyzing the winning patterns of a particular business through keyword analysis, backlinks assessment, social media monitoring, and paid advertising observation.
This article focuses on the tools that offer automation and assistance in performing competitor analysis in various aspects, including keyword research, traffic, backlinks, social media, email marketing, and more for better optimization and business growth.
Let’s begin!
Why Should You Use Competitor Analysis Tools?
Competitor analysis has become an essential part of every marketing strategy as the need to stay on top of audiences’ minds is growing. Competitor analysis tools have made the work easier for marketers as they provide a clear overview of who your top rival brands are and what are the elements of their marketing strategy. You can identify the marketing gaps between your and competitor brands using online tools.
This data helps in enhancing your own digital marketing strategy by adding elements to your existing one similar to your rivals’ approach. Additionally, these tools help you stay updated with the ongoing market trends so you reach your audience better.
The usage of efficient competitor analysis tools and findings allows you to make informed business decisions related to product and service launches.
Read More: Competitive Analysis: Learn How to Stack Up Against Competition
10 Best Competitor Spying Tools in 2023 to Spy on & Analyze What & How Your Competitors Are Doing
Here is a list of the top 10 competitor analyses to go for in 2023:
1. RanksPro.io
RanksPro.io is a comprehensive SEO suite, offering a wide range of features for various purposes. This tool comes with a user-friendly dashboard, accurate analytics, and data-driven report generation. It provides both free as well as paid features that are personalized to fulfill every business need.
Businesses can easily track the progress of their SEO strategies and monitor current rankings as compared to their competitors. The unconventional support from RanksPro.io makes it more powerful as its response time never disappoints its users.
Key Features:
- Provide customized reports of rankings, keywords, organic traffic, and SEO bugs on multiple devices (desktops and mobiles).
- Support over 150 languages to help users understand the content in their local region.
- Daily performance tracking without any credit limitations through paid SEO plans and features.
- Forever free plan available for beginners and learning purposes to know how RanksPro works.
Pricing: Free plans provide limited user access to the tools. There are three paid plans: $19 per month (pro), $39 (elite), and $99 (ultimate).
2. SEMrush
SEMrush is one of the leading competitor analysis tools that provide a detailed overview of your competitors’ marketing activities directly into your inbox. All you need is to enter the URL of your rival brands and SEMrush will analyze their site’s traffic, market share, content activities, and most popular business segment within a few minutes.
Key Features:
- Offers multiple competitor analysis tools, including traffic, social media tracker, organic research, PR monitoring tool, SEO analysis tool, and market analysis tool.
- Provides various features and tools for free.
- Integrates data from various other tools, including Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Google Business Profile seamlessly.
- Gives real-time market insights from over 190 countries and regions.
Pricing: Free tools are available for free with limited features. The paid plans start at $108.3 and go up to $416.66/mo when billed annually.
3. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the most popular competitor analysis tools among marketers,also known as the fastest backlink crawler that gives you access to 7+ years of competitor’s historical data, including domain traffic, domain rating, URL rating, linked domains, and external links. Besides, rivals’ keyword and backlink audits, Ahrefs also give an overview of the website’s outgoing links so you have an idea of their ranking pattern.
Key Features:
- Evaluates primarily three aspects of competitors’ website, including traffic, structure, and link profile.
- Keeps a check on millions of keywords across 189 locations.
- Allows you to review and analyze the keyword bidding history through the Ads Position History chart.
- Provides access to analyze up to 200 domains at a time with paid plans.
Pricing: Offers free plan with limited access. The paid plans start at $99 and go up to $999 per month.
4. Ubersuggest
From Neil Patel, Ubersuggest is a leading keyword analysis tool that lets you understand the pattern and number of your competitors’ keywords and backlinks. You can analyze both elements for free by signing up on the tool and entering your competitor’s URL. The tool lets you explore the keywords your competitors are ranking.
Key Features:
- It provides you data across multiple aspects of your competitors like domain score, referring pages, backlinks, and more.
- Its specific feature, Traffic Analyzer Overview, provides you with a detailed analysis of monthly traffic, organic keywords, and much more.
- This tool is one of the best when you want to analyze which of the competitors’ pages are ranking on top, giving you a detailed idea about their content strategy.
- The backlink data provides you with data on whom they are earning backlinks from, and whom you can approach with better and fresh content pieces.
Pricing: Starts with a 7-day free trial. The paid plans come with a monthly or lifetime offer. The monthly paid plan starts at $12/mo while the lifetime offer begins at $120.
5. MOZ
Another top name in the field, MOZ lets you find key insights about your competitors easily and quickly. The competitive analysis tool from MOZ provides you with competitive inteland helps you identify keyword opportunities by assessing their top-ranking keywords. You only need to input your domain and it gives you an analysis of your top competitors.
Features:
- Analyze the keyword gaps between your and your competitor’s strategies by evaluating their top-performing keywords.
- Get analysis on the SEO health with metrics like domain authority, and more.
- It provides you data on the top content piece of your competitors they are ranking well on.
- Analyze keywords, links, and content that are working for your competitors, which you can use to refine your own strategies.
Pricing: It has multiple pricing plans, with the standard plan starting at $99/month, Medium at $179/month, Large at $299/month, and the Premium at $599/month.
6. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is one of the top competitor analysis tools that give you a comprehensive overview of your rival brand’s social media strategy through active listening and tracking.It gives you insights into your ongoing industry-related topics, trends, and posts among your top competitors.
It can easily integrate with all the major social media platforms, including Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest.
The tool is trusted by over 30000 reputed brands, including Yale, Atlassian, Unicef, Columbia, Trello, and Equifa for its exceptional social media services. In addition to competitive analysis, the tool offers various other services, including engagement, advocacy, listening, and publishing.
Key Features:
- Gives you access to various niche relevant hashtags, and terms, by researching millions of ongoing conversations over the internet.
- Analyzes audience sentiments and pain points from various social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
- Offers services to different sectors, including travel and hospitality, computer and software, retail, and higher education for all types of businesses small, medium, or large.
Pricing: Starts with a 30-day free trial. The paid plans start at $249 and go up to $499 per month. You can also customize your pricing plan with the enterprise plan.
7. SpyFu
SpyFu is also one of the most popular competitor analysis tools, that gives you detailed insights into so many factors, including ranking, backlinks, top-performing pages, and much more. You can see your competitors’ every positioning on Google, including their rank as well as any keyword they have created a paid ad on, with historical data dating back to 14 years.
Features:
- It gives analysis on multiple facets of your competitors including their ranks, keywords, backlinks, ads, and more.
- Analyze their traffic, and their SEO & PPC strategies, identify new competitors who are rising well, and compare with your performance to identify strategic gaps.
- Its PPC competitor research is a feature-rich aspect that lets you dive deep into your competitors who are gaining well through sponsored ads.
- Analyze how they are curating their content, which content pieces are ranking well, and what are their top-ranking keywords.
Pricing: The basic plan starts at $16 per month for an annual plan, which goes up to $149/month for the annual plan. If you go with monthly plans, that could cost a bit more.
8. Majestic
If you are concerned about updating your backlink strategy and want to dive deep into how your top competitors are navigating this complex path and generating high-authority backlinks, then Majestic is the tool for you. It only provides a complete backlink profile of a domain but for the individual content pieces as well.
Features:
- You can analyze a specific content piece’s backlink profile relevant to your targeted keyword, which you can use to see how your competitors’ content is gaining links and from which sources, to improve your own backlink strategy.
- It provides you with key metrics that includes quality and quantity score related to a link.
- You can check the top backlinks of every top competitor in your niche.
- Its feature Link Context helps to find the links between your competitors and you.
Pricing: The basic plan starts at £39.99 per month, which goes up to £319.99 per month for the full API tool.
9. Similarweb
Apart from ranking, another big factor that helps you gauge where you stand in front of your competitors is inbound traffic. This is where Similarweb works for you. It provides you key data into how much monthly traffic they get, and from which sources or channels they generate their traffic from. The visualized data of referral traffic sources gives you an insight you can effectively work upon to improve your SEO strategies.
Features:
- It helps to keep a close track of your competitors, and their growth or decline in the inbound traffic.
- It also provides metrics into inbound traffic from mobile devices, coupled with engagement metrics.
- The traffic data shows insights into the demographics of the visitors including location, gender, and age.
- It also provides data on the different channels that send visitors to a particular site including search engines, social platforms, and more.
Pricing: For individuals and start-ups, there are two plans at $125 & $333 per month. If you are a large business or enterprise you can request a customized plan from them.
10. BuzzSumo
Content is the king in the digital marketing field, and when you are looking to spy on the content strategies of your competitors, BuzzSumo is the tool for you. You can look at key metrics on top-performing content, not just yours but your competitors’ as well, which includes social channel engagement and total shares online. This helps to identify what are the latest content trends in your industry, so you can strategize on how to capitalize on them.
Features:
- You can find new and insightful pieces of content and can generate your own content ideation strategies based on that.
- Compare how your content is performing as compared to your competitors.
- Analyze what type of content and what format is a hit amongst your target audience, and which content is more popular and shared across social channels.
- Using the tool is extremely easy and blazing fast; you only need a few seconds to get started.
Pricing: It provides a 30-day free trial offer. After that, you can get started with the basic plan at $199 per month, which goes up to $999 per month.
Conclusion:
Keeping a check on your competitors’ plans is equally important as managing your own marketing strategy. It not only helps you stay updated with the recent developments but also outdo your top competitors. However, it requires thorough research before you go on to perform competitor analysis to optimize your marketing plan. With the selection of the right tools, you can lessen the work of gap analysis and comparison with just a few clicks in a few minutes. Consider any of the above-listed tools by evaluating which one aligns with your goals and budget.
