If you want to succeed online, you must find ways to outperform your competition. With online competitor analysis tools, you can keep tabs on what your competition is doing and find new strategies to help you rise above your competition. On this page, we’ll cover eight competitor analysis tools for various digital marketing strategies, from social media to search engine optimization.
Keep reading to learn more about these valuable tools for analyzing your competition! If you want to learn more about online competitor analysis tools and other marketing tips and tricks, sign up for Revenue Weekly!
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Online competitor analysis tools: Search engine optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of boosting your website’s ranking in search results to drive more organic traffic to your page. Many companies optimize their pages so they can appear at the top of search results.
In order to rank highly, it’s essential to know who else is ranking in those results and what they’re doing to get there. With these competitor analysis tools, you can track how your competitors perform in search results:
1. Ahrefs
Cost: $99-$999 per month, 7-day trial for $7
With Ahref’s Site Explorer, you can get a look at organic search traffic to a competitor’s website and analyze their backlink profile. You can even use it to track their Google positions. Plus, you’ll get all the important information you need to know about your competition’s SEO campaign.
When you use Ahrefs, you get:
- Keyword analysis
See what keywords your competition uses and ranks for in search results. This analysis allows you to understand which pages bring the most traffic to those websites. It’s a great feature for helping you discover potential keyword opportunities for your business.
- Backlink analysis
Backlinks play an essential part in helping increase your site’s ranking in search results. With Ahref’s backlink checker, you can see what websites link to your competition and analyze the quality of your competitor’s link profiles. This tool helps you understand the strength of your competition’s link profile and find new avenues for earning links.
- Paid traffic analysis
In addition to organic traffic analysis, you can use this tool to analyze paid search campaigns. You can see if your competition uses paid search and the sources of their paid traffic, like Google Ads or Facebook ads.
With Ahref’s Site Explorer, you can understand your competition’s organic presence better and use that information to create a better SEO campaign for your business. Ahrefs is a great online competitor analysis tool for companies that want to learn about their competition’s performance on search engines.
2. MozBar
Cost: Free to use MozBar, MozBar Premium comes with a Moz Pro plan, costing $99-$599 per month
If you’re looking to understand how your business stacks up to your competition in search results, Mozbar is a free competitor analysis tool for comparing your performance to the competition. This tool allows you to get metrics on a page while viewing it. You can add this extension to your browser to see scores as you search and view pages.
MozBar features something called Domain Authority (DA) score, which operates on a scale of 0-100. Essentially, they calculate a company’s DA score based on factors that matter to Google, like the number of links and linking root domains. While a DA score doesn’t automatically determine where someone will place in the search results, it can help companies predict where they’re likely to rank.
With MozBar, you can:
- See your competition’s DA score
It’s essential to know your competition’s DA score so you can see how you stack up against them.
This tool helps you see if you have a better or worse domain score than the people you’re competing with in search results. MozBar offers valuable insight that allows you to improve your DA score to try and outrank competitors.
- Analyze your competition’s link profile
Links play a fundamental role in helping your site rank better in search results. With MozBar, you can see how many people link to a competitor’s page. You can see who’s linking to your competitors and find new link opportunities for your business.
- Analyze important page metrics
When you view a competitor’s page, you can compare metrics, like link metrics, and see how they stack up to your pages. It allows you to gain valuable information about your competition and see how you can perform better than them.
MozBar creates an excellent opportunity for you to analyze your rivals and find ways to try and outrank them in search results. If you’re looking for a simple, free online competitor analysis tool, MozBar may be the answer to your SEO monitoring needs.
Online competitor analysis tools: Content marketing
If you want to drive people to your business’s page, you must create valuable content.
Content marketing helps drive interested leads to your company while helping improve your SEO ranking in the process. If your competition creates content, you must keep tabs on the type of content they create and how it’s performing for them. Let’s look at two online competitor analysis tools you can use for your content marketing strategy:
3. Ontolo
Cost: $97-$297 per month, custom packages available
Ontolo is a data mining tool that lets you analyze all aspects of your content. You can look at the traffic numbers for pages, track backlinks, and more. This tool offers some SEO functions too, but it’s even better for content.
With Ontolo, you can:
- Get valuable data
Ontolo scours the web for data on your competition. This data helps you learn more about your competitors and the type of content they publish. You can see what they’re publishing and when they’re publishing it.
- See who’s engaging with competitor content
Ontolo helps you see what prospects engage with competitor content. You’ll know who’s following those competitors and what content gets them engaged and interested. Ontolo collects social accounts and organizes them for you.
- Crawl list of prospects fast
If you have a list of prospects from your competitors, you can upload your file and easily crawl through it. It allows you to upload your prospect list from any source and quickly comb through it to find the best prospects.
Ontolo is just one tool for analyzing your competition and understanding their content marketing strategy.
4. Buzzsumo
Cost: $99-$499+ per month
Buzzsumo is another content marketing tool you can use for competitor analysis. This tool helps you find content for relevant topics.
When you use Buzzsumo, you’ll find:
- Relevant topics for content
Buzzsumo enables you to find topics to cover. You can analyze topics your competitors covered and find new opportunities for writing content.
- See shares
You can see who’s sharing your competition’s content on social media. It creates an opportunity for you to know where you can also earn shares on your content.
- Find top-performing topics and competitors
If you have a content topic in mind, you can see who’s performing well for that topic. This feature helps you understand who’s competing for those keywords and how you can rank better than those competitors.
Buzzsumo is an excellent option if you’re looking for a competitor analysis tool that provides you with in-depth information about competitors that create content like yours.
Online competitor analysis tools: Email marketing
Email marketing is one of the best strategies for nurturing leads and getting them to engage with your business. People receive emails from dozens of companies, so you must create an email marketing strategy that gets leads to open your emails and interact with your content.
With online competitor analysis tools, you can see how your email marketing campaign stacks up to the competition. Here are two tools you can use to monitor your competition’s email campaigns.
5. Mailcharts
Cost: $99-$999 per month, free version offered
Mailcharts is a competitor analysis tool that allows you to collect emails from your competition. You can analyze their campaigns to get ideas for your emails. It’s one of the best tools for analyzing your competition and seeing what they’re doing with their email campaigns.
When you use Mailcharts, you’ll get data on:
- Subject lines
See what your competition is writing to hook their audience. It will help inspire your subject lines and create ones that engage your audience.
- Frequency
The frequency data allows you to compare how often you and your competition send emails. It allows you to see if you’re on track for creating an engaging email campaign, sending too many emails, or need to send more.
- Timing
Sending your emails at the right time is a crucial component of your success. Mailchart will give you data on when competitors send emails so you can discover if there’s a better time to send emails and get your audience to engage.
If you want to create a better email marketing campaign than your competition, Mailcharts is an easy online competitor analysis tool to help improve your campaigns.
6. Owletter
Cost: $19-$79 per month
Owletter is another competitor analysis tool that allows you to capture and analyze your competition’s emails. This tool screenshots important emails and notifies your company when your competition sends valuable emails. It’s a great tool for learning about your competitors and their email strategy.
When you use Owletter, you’ll:
- Learn about your competition’s strategy
Owletter allows you to see what your competition is doing with their email campaign. You can see when they send emails, how often they send them, and how they’re driving success with their campaign.
- Analyze your competition’s performance
When you use Owletter, you can analyze your competition’s performance and see how they drive results over time. You can spot trends and find opportunities for your business to send emails and perform better than your competition.
- Keep a record of your competition’s emails
You don’t need to rely on sifting through your inbox to find valuable emails for reference. With Owletter, you can capture and store emails forever on their server. Your team can access these emails at any time too.
If you’re looking for competitor analysis tools that will monitor your competition’s email campaigns, Owletter is one of your options.
This tool enables you to learn about your competition’s email marketing campaigns so you can create better emails and better digital marketing results.
Online competitor analysis tools: Social media
Social media marketing is one of the best strategies for connecting with your audience one on one. From Facebook to LinkedIn, your competition uses these social networks to connect with your audience and get them interested in your business. If you want to see what competitors do to engage their social media followers, you can use the following tools for analyzing your competition on social media.
7. Keyhole
Cost: $99-$999 per month, free trial offered
Keyhole is a social media competitor analysis tool that allows companies to see information about social media elements from their competitors. You can review your competition’s performance on social media platforms and see how you stack up against them.
When you use Keyhole, you:
- Get advanced hashtag analytics
You can track hashtags your competition uses and understand how people use them. This tool allows you to see if your audience uses your competition’s hashtags and the context in which they use them.
- Access information about influencers
If your competition partners with influencers, you can track those influencers and their performance. You can see how influencers work with your competition.
- Monitor brand mentions
Want to know what others are saying about your competitors? With Keyhole, you can monitor what people say about your competition and see how they react to their brand. It helps you understand how people perceive competitors compared to your business.
If you want to monitor your competition’s social media performance, Keyhole will help you do it.
8. Social Mention
Cost: Free option available, paid plans run from $3.88-$21.66 per month
Social Mention is one of the best online competitor analysis tools for seeing what people say about your competitors across social media. This tool enables you to search for keywords and topics related to your competition and see the context in which users talk about that brand, their products, and more.
If you use Social Mention, you see:
- How people about competitors
This tool enables you to gain an understanding of how your competition’s followers perceive them. You can see both positive and negative feedback about your competition and learn from their mistakes.
- Metrics on top keywords
With Social Mention, you can search the platform for top keywords and get valuable metrics on those keywords. If there are keywords your audience uses, you can search those keywords through Social Mention and see how people use them on social media.
- Valuable information about audiences
Social mention helps you understand you and your competition’s audience. You can learn what topics they talk about, what time they engage with posts, and more. It helps you understand how to reach your competition’s audience and get them interested in your business.
If you want one of the most insightful tools for analyzing your competition, Social Mention is the answer.
This tool will help you understand how people interact with your competitors so you can create a better strategy and get them to interact with your business.
An alternative to online competitor analysis tools: WebFX
If you’re running multiple campaigns, you’re going to need various online competitor analysis tools to monitor each strategy you use. It can become overwhelming and cause you to spend a large chunk of time watching different channels. While competitor analysis tools help your business understand your competition, it can quickly become time-consuming and challenging to gather all the data and make sense of it.
What if there was a way that you could monitor all your strategies and channels without lifting a finger?
By partnering with a digital marketing company like WebFX, you can take the work off your plate and still reap the benefits of competitor monitoring. Not only do you get a team of experts running your campaign, but you’ll always have someone to keep tabs on your competition and use that information to improve your online marketing strategies. Contact us online or call us at 888-601-5359 to speak with one of our skilled strategists today about how competitor analysis can help move your business forward!
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Macy is a marketing writer with over five years of experience creating content for dozens of industries including food and beverage, home services, and education. She also specializes in creating SEO and PPC content. Her work has been featured by Search Engine Journal, HubSpot, Entrepreneur, Clutch, and more. In her free time, Macy enjoys trying new crafts and reading comic books. -
WebFX is a full-service marketing agency with 1,100+ client reviews and a 4.9-star rating on Clutch! Find out how our expert team and revenue-accelerating tech can drive results for you! Learn more
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