37 Competitive Analysis Tools That Will Improve Your Digital Marketing

Looking to get a leg up on the competition?

Look no further than this comprehensive list of competitive analysis tools.

You may be wondering why monitoring your competition is necessary.

The answer is that it simply makes your life easier. Rather than rely on guesswork, these tools make it easy to see what content your competitors are producing, what keywords they’re ranking for, what channels they use, and much more.

The best part? You can easily learn from their successes and missteps. By knowing what has or hasn’t worked for them, you’ll have a better idea of what to focus on in your own marketing strategy.

Competitive Analysis Tools

1.Serpstat

Using Serpstat, you can easily track the positions of competitor domains using keywords, as well as receive a full backlinks analysis including PageRank and TrustRank. It comes with a “Domain vs. Domain” feature, which lets you compare up to three sites and find any similarities and differences in keywords. Serpstat also analyzes PPC strategies and social media channels.

2. SpyFu

SpyFu is all about helping you find relative keywords your competition is using. It lets you research, and later download, your competitor’s profitable keywords. You can research both their paid and organic keywords, and then export them as a list.

3. SEMrush

SEMrush is another powerful tool used by many digital marketers. You can perform searches to see where competitor traffic is coming from, whether it be banner ads, organic searches or paid search. You can also use its backlink analysis and keyword research for a better understanding of what works for your competitors.

4. Rival IQ

Rival IQ allows you track and analyze competition by tracking what they’re doing, what they’re most successful campaigns are, and how consumers respond. You can analyze their activity across social media, the web and SEO metrics.

5. Competitive Analysis Tools – Similar Web

With Similar Web, you can compare the traffic statistics of your competitors and where their traffic is coming from. You can also find which sites you are competing most closely with based on similarity and rank.

6.Ahrefs

Ahrefs strength is in its detailed backlink report. You can analyze a site based on which websites are linking to it and how strong the backlinks are, as well as which keyword anchors they use.

7. Web CEO

Web CEO offers comprehensive competitor research and analysis, allowing you to compare important metrics to those of your competition. With it, you’ll get a full ranking of 20 of your competitors, competitor backlink profiles, traffic rank history, competitor metric widgets, and more.

8. SEO Spyglass

SEO Spyglass is another tool designed specifically to “spy” on the competition. Its vast set of features include a full backlink report (including domains, URLs and anchor keywords used), the PageRank of each inbound link, traffic sent from each link, the location of the link (homepage, blog, major directory, etc.) among its other features.

9. Competitor Analysis Tools – Alexa

Amazon’s Alexa has made a big impact in a short amount of time. Its competitor analysis tools allow you to benchmark your site’s traffic and metrics against your competitors, measure your traffic and popularity in relation to others, in addition to identifying the top sites in your industry or niche.

10. Siteliner

This one works a little differently: Siteliner helps build backlinks by helping your competitors. Using the tool, you can quickly identify your competitor’s broken links. Then, you can offer to replace those links (which are negatively affecting their rank) and ask for a backlink in return.

11. TopSERP

TopSERP is unique in that it gives you an in-depth competitor analysis report which has been manually analyzed by industry experts. It offers both free and paid versions, and reports include organic and paid keywords, estimated traffic, social presence reports, backlink analysis, etc., as well as a plan for your site to move forward in the competitive space.

12. Keyword Competitor

Keyword Competitor helps you identify the long-tail keywords your competitors aren’t using, and capitalize on them. Additionally, you can track their organic and paid keywords, check their keyword position rank, preview their ads and landing pages, and receive emails when your competition is performing better than you are.

13. Competitor Analysis Tools – Social Mention

Not surprisingly, Social Mention deals specifically with social media. It provides brand mentions across blogs, social media channels, videos, questions, etc. Simply type in a keyword and it will return a list of mentions, including the Strength, Sentiment, and Reach of the keyword or domain.

14. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is well known in the marketing world for its content, keyword, and social network tracking. As far as competitor analysis, it can help you find the most shared content from a competitor. You can search by competitor or topic, and see how many shares their popular content received. Then, when preparing content of your own, you can mirror what’s been successful for your competitors.   

15. Rank Signals

Rank Signals works primarily to check competitor backlinks and traffic sources. Through it, you’ll be able to uncover your competitor’s social channels, mentions, and activity, and where their links are coming from to improve your own SEO and social strategies.

16. SEO Site Checkup

SEO Site Checkup lets you scan your competitor’s sites and delivers a report covering six areas: common SEO issues, suggested mobile usability enhancements, necessary server and security improvements, possible speed optimizations, semantic web and structured data usage tips, and social media engagement issues. By identifying areas where your competitor is lagging, you’ll simultaneously areas where you have the opportunity to gain a leg up.

17. Competitor Analysis Tools – Kompyte

Using Kompyte, you can compare traffic, visitor behavior, referrals, search rankings and keywords, and social metrics. You can choose which competitors to track or Kompyte will suggest them based on keywords.

18. Open Link Profiler

Open Link Profiler is specifically designed to track backlinks. Its comprehensive reports will show a general link overview, country, and industry, as well as link age. 

19. Monitor Backlinks

Another backlink analysis tool, Monitor Backlinks will send you weekly emails which summarize your competition’s new links and lost links as well as your own link analysis. The starter package allows you to receive updates on 1 domain name and 2 competitors. 

20. Feedly

Feedly is another content monitoring tool that aggregates news and popular content. But with Feedly, you can customize the sites you want to follow so it only shows a group of your competitors. You can add sites quickly using Feedly’s browser extension.

21. Competitive Analysis Tools – iSpionage

iSpionage focuses exclusively on paid advertisements. It will help you identify top PPC competitors, their monthly budget, and AdWords strategy, as well as seven years worth of SEO keyword data. iSpionage is also unique in that offers information on your competitor’s A/B testing, including a warning when they may be testing.

22. Searchmetrics

Searchmetrics is suite of tools that measure everything from mobile and social performance, PPC, local and global SEO, and delivers detailed information on keyword rankings and search strategy.

23. Owletter

Owletter is

. It captures emails sent from a website to their mailing list, automatically takes a screenshot and stores it for analyzing. That way, you can gain insight into what information your competition is sharing, their email designs, headlines, etc. 

24. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is social media-focused. Through it you can monitor your competition’s posts and brand mentions and sentiment across the web.

25. Competitive Analysis Tools – Audisense

Also built for social media, Audisense helps you analyze your competitor’s audience based on their Twitter followers. It delivers comprehensive data on location, gender, and interests of those followers to help you better understand your own target audience and uncover where your niche is.

26. WhatRunsWhere

WhatRunsWhere focuses on paid ads by showing you where your competitor is advertising and what creatives they’re using. Simply enter the domain you’d like to check, or a keyword to pull ads are running for it. By gaining an understanding of where your competitors are advertising and how their ads are performing, you’ll be able to build a more effective PPC strategy for your own campaign.

27. Fanpage Karma

Fanpage Karma will pull your competitor’s best and worst performing Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest content. However, it does work best with Facebook. Its free analytics include engagement, growth, frequency, and other metrics. Additionally, it will show the most used words and hashtags, as well as best times to post and content ideas.

28. Advanced Web Ranking

Advanced Web Ranking offers comprehensive competitor analysis tools to give you insight into their website, social media strategies, backlinks, and on-page optimization. Through it, you can spend less time monitoring and more time optimizing and building strategies, based on your competition’s successes. 

29. Competitive Analysis Tools – Unamo SEO

Previously called Positionly, Unamo SEO combines a set of new tools with traditional competitor analysis reports. Track industry domains by keywords and receive in-depth backlinks and keyword data for each domain. Additionally, Unamo claims to monitor media from around the web so you can be aware of any incoming links and mentions.

30. Rank Ranger

Rank Ranger’s analytics tools pull the top 20 organic search results ranking for your keywords and give you side-by-side comparisons of competitor domains, keywords, rank, and keyword search volume. It will also pull the top 20 paid results, delivering their ad position, average cost per click and search volume, plus reveal the content used in their ads.

31. Topsy

Interested in your competition’s Twitter account? Then Topsy’s for you. Topsy lets you look up your competition’s tweets back to 2006, and monitor how many tweets they have, and which were the most engaging.

32. Open Site Explorer

Courtesy of Moz, Open Site Explorer lets you find out who is linking to your competitors and compare link data.

33. Competitive Analysis Tools – Majestic SEO

Another backlink tool, Majestic SEO has long one been one of the more popular analysis tools. Use it to download your competition’s link profile and export it for future use.

34. SE Ranking

SE Ranking helps you monitor your competition’s search rankings and collect data on their average position, traffic forecast, and visibility.

35. BuiltWith

BuiltWith is a free tool that analyzes the code of a website. Doing so reveals information such as what content management system they use, what plugins are installed if they’re using retargeting, and what they’re tracking. It also offers a Chrome extension to easily analyze websites as you browse.

36. Moat

Moat is unique in that it focuses on Google display ads. Simply enter a brand name, and it will pull all of their display ads for you to view at once for creative ideas. Their paid version also allows you to see analytics including placements, impressions, etc.

37. Searchmetrics

Searchmetrics shows you the top five keyword phrases for any site. With the paid version, you’ll have access to more detailed information social media and specific content, as well as compare desktop vs. mobile traffic.

Conclusion

Though some of the tools perform similar functions, they all vary in price, scope, and focus.

This list will help you identify which tools are right for you, and kickstart your competitor analysis strategy.