Top 10 SEO Competitor Research Tools You Must Try

Do you know why your competitors are outranking you? Ever wondered how they rank at the top on the first page of SERPs and how much website traffic they get? Answering these questions will help you in defining the success or failure of your future SEO tactics. 

A digital marketer must focus on competitor research before they could make a strategic plan. 

According to research, no less than 70% of large enterprises think that the effectiveness of their previous campaigns would be better if they had conducted competitor research in the past. 

Take a moment.

Think of your past campaign could have done better too if you had done a competitive analysis. 

If your answer is yes, it’s still not late. Starting today itself, you can begin with studying your competitors and devising a marketing strategy based on the pros and cons of your competitors. 

To make your job easy, you should keep certain competitor analysis tools and techniques handy and leverage them to track their search rankings, social mentions, traffic, content, and other means they use to thrive in business. Regardless of the industry, you serve in, keeping a tab on your competitors helps you stay informed of things that are working or failing in the market.

SEO competitor tracker tools give digital marketers and SEO experts a competitive edge in determining and preparing strategies that help generate value-added results. 

Why Competitor Research?

1. Finding new ways to connect with potential customers, boost customer loyalty and enhance retention. 
2. Looking for practices and techniques they follow that attract customers.
3. Getting inspired from their SEO and SMO strategies to drive traffic and boost conversions.
4. Evaluating the ongoing strategies based on analysis to build a more tactical approach for staying ahead.

If you are wondering how, to begin with, competitor analysis, we have beefed up the list of the best SEO competitor analysis tools you need to know to help you learn more about your competitors, understand their SEO strategies, and develop a sound plan.

Top 10 Competitor Analysis Tools

1. Ubersuggest

Source: Neilpatel

While analysing competitors, you need to focus on the backlinks they use, targeting keywords, and ranking web pages. 

Ubersuggest uses features that make it easy for you to spy on your competitors and scrutinize all the information. Once you have gathered the data, you can build a strategy to outrank your competition.

With Ubersuggest, it becomes easy to find the high search volume keywords, as it has over 322,000 keywords present, helping you to clearly interpret what your competitors are targeting and from where the traffic is coming. Talking about keyword ranking there are four more factors associated with it.

• Volume, including the keyword’s average monthly search volume.
• Position, including the URL, ranked in the SERP.
• EV or estimated visits, including the estimated traffic on the webpage for the keyword.
• SD or SEO difficulty, including the estimated competition based on organic search.

Keywords tell a lot about the website, and by clicking on the keyword you can further get more information regarding the top 100 URLs.

As a marketer, you need to also look for the backlinks used by the competitors. Ubersuggest provides you with another list of features for analysing your competitor's market and presence.

• Domain Score – It includes the overall strength of the website from 1 to 100, where 100 is the highest and 1 is the lowest.
• Backlinks – It includes the total number of backlinks created to the website.
• Referring Domains – It includes the overall number of unique domains that link back to the website.
• Backlink Over Time – It shows the graph of backlink growth.
• Social Share – It shows the number of shares made on social sites like Facebook and Pinterest.

Now that you have seen what your competitor is doing, you no longer have to predict what is going on with your competitor's SEO strategy. You know the keywords they are using, backlinks, and the top pages they are focusing on. With this information, you are all set to create a results-driven strategy.

Pricing: $12 - $40 Per Month

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2. SEMrush

Source: SEMrush

The purpose of competitor research is null and void if you are unable to turn the gathered information into actionable insights, which help you to improve or develop your SEO and content strategy.

Content marketing is an essential part of SEO marketing strategy, and documenting an effective content strategy is an infallible way to succeed in content marketing. SEMrush is another popular SEO competitor analysis tool, used by a plethora of digital marketers to conduct sturdy competitor analysis. SEMrush allows you to accomplish:

• Competitor analysis
• Keyword analysis
• Backlink analysis
• Website audit

SEMrush tools show you updated keywords and ranked web pages on SERPs. Gathering real-time data such as competitive insights and keywords can help you create eloquent content appealing to your readers. Procuring such a marketing strategy will aid in hitting the right target market.

Pricing: $119 - $449 Per Month

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3. Alexa

Source: Alexa

Personalisation and optimisation are the keys.

In order to attract a new customer base, you need to focus on content optimisation. The content you create, whether it is for backlinks or social sites, makes sure it is valuable to your target audience. Otherwise, they might skip reading it, which will make all your effort go in vain.

Alexa allows businesses to track global website traffic. One of the best competitor research tools used by several B2B and B2C companies for transforming analysed data to generate competitive value for the business. Alexa is popular because of the deep analytics insights it provides that help in comparing and optimising business on the internet.

Business growth requires resources, strategy, and time. To achieve that you need to gather the right metrics, strategic insights, and competitive intellect, which will help in making a sound and informed decision to attract the audience.

Meeting the growing demand of the audience requires competitive analysis, helping you to be certain that you understand what your audience is looking for. Alexa tool is mostly used by

• Website Owner: Being armed with precise website metrics such as page views, unique visits, website clicks, bounce rate, time spent on site, and so on will help in developing a strategy giving you a competitive edge, building an online presence, and meeting your SEO goal.
• Digital Marketers: For meeting your online marketing strategies, digital marketers require thorough insights to optimise the ongoing strategies. In addition, it provides an optimal landscape, helping you to understand what practices can help you thrive.
• Content Marketers: Content marketers and strategists require such tools to conduct a thorough analysis, idea generation, content management, and content creation.

Pricing: $99 - $149 Per Month

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4. Ahrefs

Source: Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another renowned competitor analysis tool, known for its quality of backlink data. Considered the best tool for digital marketers, website owners, marketing agencies, etc. Take your competitors as the treasure house of information, informing you of every effective SEO strategy, and making you aware of tactics that will not work on target prospects, considering this will help you rise steeply the organic traffic of your website. 

• Understanding what works best in the industry and what does not.
• Look for their weakness and get the most out of them, at the same time look for their strength and imitate them.
• Learn what SEO tasks and strategies help them to move forward.

When it comes to finding the best SEO competitor tracker tools, Ahrefs is mostly preferred.

Pricing: $99 - $999 Per Month

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5. Moz

Source: Moz

Research is the key. Where many companies keep on wondering where and how their competitors are getting so much traffic and lead from, it's tools like Moz that help in digging deep into the source.

Moz is one tool that shows how competitor research can help in exceeding website traffic. This tool helps in researching keywords, spam scores, backlinks, traffic analysis, etc. With the help of Moz, you get precise insights on the keywords that you should be targeting, the type of content and blogs you need to produce to attract the audience, places to get quality backlinks, and so on.

• Helps in analyzing your actual SEO competitors.
• Provides you with correct insights about what should be done in your SEO strategy to beat your competitors.
• Gives you complete link information and insightful data for any website.
• Provides you with broken inbound links on your website.

The in-depth research Moz provides makes it the most popular and lived tool among marketers.

Pricing: $99 - $599 Per Month

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6. SimilarWeb

Source: Similarweb

SimilarWeb is considered the best competitor traffic analysis tool that helps you figure out how a website gets visitors.

It provides the average search traffic that originates from various search engines as well as traffic distribution across all channels, such as social media, shares, direct, etc.

Looking for unique website visitors became easy with this tool. SimilarWeb is essentially a competitor analysis tool to analyse a website, app, or platform. It's used by major brands since it's flexible and delivers one of the most accurate sets of information on any website.

SimilarWe provides you with the optimum choice of checking the keywords that bring the most traffic from search engine results. With this tool, you are provided with apt information that helps you to identify which keywords should be your top priority, as they have the potential to drive more traffic to your client's website.

SimilarWeb provides you with a list of competitors based on the type of websites being ranked in SERP for the same set of keywords.

You can use two or more competitors to compare traffic statistics with SimilarWeb, as it will help you to gather all the needed insights to produce an effective strategy.

Pricing: $249 - $449 Per Month

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7. BuzzSumo

source: BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a popular SEO competitor analysis tool that mainly focuses on social media networks. However, it also assists with SEO content research by assessing content shareability and generating backlink volume. BuzzSumo helps in determining which competitor’s content or themes are prevailing, making customers share or engage with the most.

For every search phrase, you type into the platform, BuzzSumo will show you the total number of shares for links connected to that search term. Any content marketer should be aware of this information. It informs you which articles, subjects, and types of material are the most popular, providing you with a clear picture of what you should write about. With BuzzSumo SEO competition tool, you are provided with

• Ability to compare the content strategy of different websites.
• Ability to analyse different types of content, such as articles, listicles, information graphics, videos, etc.
• Ability to dig deep for potential competitors that can be a threat in the future.

Pricing: Free / $99 - $299 Per Month

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8. iSpionage

Source: iSpionage

One of the SEO competitors tracking tools that makes it simple to examine what your competitors are doing with organic search. It contains SEO competition research, social monitoring, and keyword tracking among its features. iSpionage tool primarily focuses on AdWords campaigns and keyword competitor research.

By looking at information on the PPC keywords your competitors are bidding on, you may identify profitable terms. You can also see how many PPC keywords they're bidding on, the average position each ad appears in, monthly AdWords click traffic, and monthly PPC expenditure for each competition you scrutinise. iSpionage has a patented Keywords Effectiveness Index that assists you in identifying lucrative keywords with the greatest search volume while also evaluating cost per term and adding those high-performing keywords to your campaign.

• This tool allows you to add competitors and view the most effective keywords for organic and PPC.
• The tool provides you with an estimate of your competitors' ad and PPC budgets.
• It provides you with comparison graphs to help you differentiate between your and your competitor’s campaigns.
• This tool provides you with detailed information on your competitors' SEO and PPC keywords.
• It gives you information on search volume, average position, CPC, keyword difficulty, and other factors.
• This can assist you in deciphering your competitors' strategies and implementing the most beneficial for you.

Pricing: $59 - $299 Per Month

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9. SpyFu

Source: SpyFu

SpyFu is a robust SEO competitor tracking tool that allows you to see all statistics on your competitors' keywords in both organic and AdWords searches - as well as find even more similar phrases. All you have to do now is plug in your competitors' keywords to obtain an overall picture of their strategy.

With SpyFu, you can easily learn about the search marketing strategies that your competitors are doing and see results. You can view their Google rankings, the keywords they're presently bidding on in AdWords, and any advertisements they've purchased in the last few years.

SpyFu excels in competition research for PPC campaigns. It reveals everything your competitor did while running advertisements, including keywords, ad history, negative keywords, ad split testing, and more.

SpyFlu also offers information like average search volume per term, historical keyword usage for PPC, number of clicks, cost per click, and so on. As part of their SEO approach, this SEO competition tool also displays the organic keywords they are ranking for.

Pricing: $39 - $79 Per Month

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10. Monitor Backlinks

Source: Monitorbacklinks

Monitor Backlinks is a relatively new product on the market, but it has already established a solid reputation. Despite being newer than most of the industry competitors, Monitor Backlinks is one of the competitor research tools for backlink research. You can seamlessly track the backlinks of various competitors, uncover a slew of bad backlinks, and locate high-quality ones.

It may help you develop your link-building strategy, build quality links from your competitors, and produce link bait material by analyzing the backlinks of bloggers and webmasters in your area. You may also predict traffic growth based on keyword placement and attempts to improve a website's backlink profile.

It gives you a detailed study of any website's backlinks, whether it's yours or one of your competitors.

You may utilise this information to your advantage, for example, if you know which websites link back to your competitors, you can focus your link-building strategy on those same websites. Aside from that, the tool informs you about the backlinks' quality, which will aid in the discovery of harmful backlinks.

Pricing: $29 - $187 Per Month

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Bonus Tool: SEO PowerSuite

Source: SEOpowersuit

Powerful competitive intelligence is the activity that consists of many aspects of competitors’ research. When done properly, it helps you form and refine your own SEO and business promotion strategy, winning the top positions in Google search results.

SEO PowerSuite is a multifunctional SEO competitor research tool. This set of four tools lets you dig deeper into any aspect of your competitors’ activities, be it backlinks or content strategy. You can actually find new competitors if you are only entering a new market niche.

Thus, SEO PowerSuite lets you:

• Find domain and topic SERP competitors (Rank Tracker)
• Analyse keywords (Rank Tracker)
• See what content suits certain keywords best (Rank Tracker)
• Identify backlink strategy and legally borrow your competitor’s backlinks (SEO SpyGlass)
• Technically audit websites (WebSite Auditor)
• Compare your content to competitors’ pages (WebSite Auditor)

The tool collects real-time and historical data so that you are not only aware of your competitors’ current strategies but also of their previous results. SEO PowerSuite is, therefore, your go-to tool for understanding your competitors’ moves better and estimating when your efforts will start bringing tangible results. 

Pricing: Free / $299 - $699 Per Year or Free / $25 - $59 Per Month

All in All

Based on the recent survey we conducted on LinkedIn, 65% of people prefer SEMrush and Ahrefs as compared to other tools. However, when it comes to competitor analysis, every tool has its own distinctiveness, which makes the marketers combine a few of them to drive the best possible results.

Depending on your needs, you can integrate some or all of these SEO competitor tracking tools.

The SEO competitor research tools assist you in identifying the areas where your competitors are succeeding and the reasons behind their success. These can also aid in the generation of actionable information that will help you enhance your visibility and keep up with your competitors.

Above all, make sure you're producing material that's valuable to your audience. Only if you have content that can drive your SEO can you get the most out of these competitor analysis tools.