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Businesses must delve deep into market trends and their competitors' strategies to make well-informed decisions. Learning more about your competitors’ benefits and implications will help you create a good marketing strategy and stay ahead of the game.
According to this research, 56% of online marketers spy on potential competitors and build a marketing plan to outperform them in the following three years.
While 90% of Fortune 500 Companies rely on competitive intelligence, such as online competitor analysis, to beat the competition.
Fortunately, many innovative tools have emerged to streamline and enhance this process. This article will look at valuable competitor analysis tools that touch on different aspects of your business processes.
Competitor analysis tools for SEO
1. WebCEO
WebCEO is a comprehensive SEO platform that provides tools to help businesses optimize their websites, track their search engine rankings, perform competitor analysis, and improve their online visibility. The tool allows companies to manage daily SEO data in one place.
Best features:
- Keyword research: WebCEO provides tools to discover relevant keywords, assess competition, and evaluate search volume.
- Manage hundreds of client sites: Efficiently manage multiple projects by scheduling SEO tasks in batches.
- Rank tracking: Allows businesses to monitor search engine rankings across keywords and search engines.
How to use WebCEO for competitive analysis:
With WebCEO, you can identify top competitors’ keywords and phrases that drive traffic, detect recently added backlinks, and monitor any changes in website rankings for 20 competitors.
The tool provides a comprehensive report of their backlinks quality, social media activity and citations, and the ability to measure their online reputation.
Its competitor comparison features reveal new competitors, any content, keyword, or backlink gaps, and get a clear understanding of traffic distribution.
Pricing:
WebCEO has a free 14-day trial to try out the best features. The paid plans start at $37 per month.
2. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a powerful SEO toolset that provides valuable insights into competitors, keywords, backlinks, and website health, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions.
The tool teaches how to create an effective marketing strategy and provides tutorial videos and guides. Ahrefs offers many great features, like link building, content research, and website audit.
Best features:
- Site explorer: Allows users to analyze any website's organic search traffic, backlink profile, and top-performing content.
- Keyword research: Offer a robust keyword research tool that helps businesses discover relevant keywords and assess their search volume, competition, and potential traffic.
- Crisis management: You will get an email alert whenever someone mentions your company online.
How to use Ahrefs for competitive analysis:
Ahref’s competitive analysis feature includes the site explorer that shows you metrics on any website’s organic keywords and how much traffic they bring.
The tool also provides a detailed report on competitors’ backlinks that allow you better understand what works and what doesn’t in your niche.
Pricing:
Ahrefs has four paid options to get more advanced features. It ranges from €89 up to €899 per month. You can pay monthly or annual, whereas the last can save you two months.
3. SE Ranking
SE Ranking is an all-in-one SEO software that provides businesses with a comprehensive set of tools to collect comprehensive insights on websites’ SEO performance.
This digital marketing suite covers SEO, keyword search, content, social media, PPC, and more.
Best features:
- Keyword research: Discover relevant keywords in organic and paid search results, including top keywords, search volume, click estimates, traffic costs, etc.
- Rank tracking: Monitor website rankings across different search engines and locations.
- Backlink checker: Estimate competitors’ backlink profiles and find backlink gaps;
- Competitor analysis: Analyze competitors' SEO strategies in organic and paid search results.
How to use SE Ranking for competitive analysis:
The best thing about its competitor's analysis features is the ability to check whether your competitors use paid search advertising, view their best-performing ads with top keywords, and which landing pages get paid traffic.
If you’re in the procreate brush space using a competitor analysis tool helps you identify better keywords like procreate paper texture that will help you capture more search traffic.
You can easily find out any competitors’ traffic drops and why that happened and monitor any changes in your industry.
Pricing:
SE Ranking offers three pricing plans, starting at $31 per month. You can also try a free 14-day trial to test the best features.
4. SpyFu
SpyFu is a competitive intelligence tool that gives businesses insights into their competitors' online advertising strategies, keywords, and search engine rankings.
That means you detect any keywords your competitors have purchased in Google AdWords and any ad test they’ve conducted.
Best features:
- AdWords advisor: Optimize Google Ads campaigns by accessing historical data and recommendations for bid management and keyword targeting.
- SEO research: Analyze organic search rankings, backlinks, and organic keywords to improve search engine optimization efforts.
- SERP analysis: Explore search engine results pages (SERPs) to understand the competition and identify organic and paid search opportunities.
How to use SpyFu for competitive analysis:
SpyFu shows relevant keywords in your industry and niche keywords that your main competitors use.
You can also monitor backlinks and content performing best for them. Using this data that is refreshed monthly, you can detect what backlinks are working and try to build links for your website.
Pricing:
SpyFu offers three paid plans that start at $39 per month. You can also pay annually to save money.
5. MozBar
MozBar is a browser extension developed by Moz that provides valuable SEO insights directly within your browser.
It helps you build an effective SEO strategy by guiding you via every step. MozPro includes many helpful tools such as rank tracking, page optimization, site audit, backlink analysis, keyword research, and customizable reports.
Best features:
- On-page analysis: Get instant insights on on-page elements, including meta tags, headings, and keyword usage, for better optimization.
- Link metrics: Evaluate web pages' domain authority, page authority, and spam score to assess their link quality.
- SERP analysis: Analyze search engine results pages (SERPs) and view metrics for each result, helping to identify competition and opportunities.
- Keyword research: Discover keyword suggestions, search volume, and difficulty scores to inform your content and SEO strategy.
How to use Moz for competitive analysis:
With MozBar, you can instantly define your competitors’ site performance at a glance and compare sites in a Google query. You can quickly understand how long they have been around and whether they are getting good backlinks.
Pricing:
Moz Pro includes four pricing options, ranging from $99 to $599 monthly. You can save 20% with annual billing.
Competitor analysis tools for social media
1. Social Status
SocialStatus is a comprehensive social media analytics and reporting tool that enables businesses to track their performance, monitor engagement, and analyze audience demographics.
This tool helps you analyze your competitors’ social profiles and collect valuable analytics data.
Best features:
- Social media monitoring: Track real-time mentions, comments, and engagements across social media platforms.
- In-depth reporting: Generate comprehensive reports on social media performance, audience engagement, and key metrics.
- Audience insights: Analyze audience demographics, interests, and behavior to understand better and target your social media audience.
How to use Social Status for competitive analysis:
Social Status has great competitor analytics features that let you learn more about what’s working for your competitors and their performance on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
Its Content Feed shows what kind of social posts and how frequently competitors post - everything in one place to explore.
You can evaluate their content by brand sentiment, likes, shares, engagement rate, etc., to determine what works best for them. You can gather these insights to build your social marketing strategy.
Pricing:
SocialStatus offers multiple monthly subscription plans ranging from $26 to $399 (billed annually). It also provides a free 14-day trial.
2. Phlanx
Phlanx is a social media marketing platform that offers a variety of tools and features to help businesses optimize their social media presence.
It is a great tool for measuring your competitors’ Instagram presence and checking out real influencer following.
Best features:
- Instagram Engagement Calculator: Evaluate Instagram presence and engagement and how well the audience interacts with content.
- YouTube and Instagram Auditor: Audit accounts, analyze engagement rates and subscriber data, and check out social accounts for real/fake followers.
- Competitor Tracker: Compare the data and statistics of multiple social accounts and competitors with a simplified graph.
- Campaign Manager: Manage your social media accounts and campaigns, and analyze influencer data from different social media platforms.
How to use Phlanx for competitive analysis:
Phlanx has an Engagement Calculator based on the number of followers a competitor’s account has against the rate followers interact with content (comments, likes, etc.).
The tool is great at detecting accounts with fake followers and whether an influencer’s post has legitimate engagement.
This feature helps you determine how real your competitors’ audience is.
Pricing:
Phlanx offers a free 30-day trial. The paid plans start at $39 per month with an annual payment.
3. Determ
Determ is a great AI-powered media monitoring tool that checks out how people perceive your business and what they say online in real time.
It helps companies to analyze and extract key data from contracts, reducing manual work and improving efficiency in contract management tasks.
Best features:
- Contract analysis: Determ utilizes AI to analyze contracts, extract relevant data, and provide comprehensive insights for efficient contract management.
- Automation capabilities: Streamline manual processes by saving time and reducing errors in contract management tasks.
- Compare market position: With Share of Voice, you can better understand your position on the market and find new trends using real-time data and mentions.
- Comprehensive reports: Quick competitor insights from existing dashboards or the ability to create unique ones based on your business goals.
How to use Determ for competitive analysis:
Its Competitor analysis feature summarizes all your competitors and keeps track of their social media activities and media coverage in one place.
Determ also allows real-time monitoring of competitors’ keywords or specific sources and filtering results in a single place.
The tool instantly lets you know once a competitor crisis happens, quickly reviews their content, and responds to the comments if necessary.
Pricing:
Determ includes three pricing plans. You can book a demo to explore the best features and find out their prices.
4. Social Blade
Social Blade is a social media analytics platform that provides insights and statistics for YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and Twitter accounts.
It helps businesses track their social media performance and make data-driven content strategies and collaboration decisions.
Best Features:
- User statistics, growth, and trends for YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter.
- Key metrics like total views, real-time subscriber counts, and followers gained.
- Grading system and estimated earnings metrics.
How to use Social Blade for competitive analysis:
Social Blade is great for tracking your competitor’s growth on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Enter your competitors' names, and you'll get a list of social profiles. It shows your competitors' daily follower updates and live follower count. You can compare your social presence against other brands.
Pricing:
Social Blade has a free plan. Premium memberships start at $3.99 per month.
5. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that allows businesses to schedule and manage their social media posts across multiple platforms, engage with their audience, and track performance through comprehensive analytics.
The tool includes a wide range of valuable tools, making each within one dashboard.
Best Features:
- Social Media Scheduling: Enables users to schedule and publish posts across multiple social media platforms from one centralized dashboard.
- Audience Engagement: Facilitate interaction with the audience by monitoring and responding to comments, mentions, and messages across social media channels.
- Advertising Optimization and Results Analysis: Manage your paid ads and organic content in one place and get detailed reports on ads from one user-friendly dashboard.
How to use Hootsuite for competitive analysis:
Hootsuite shows all your competitors’ social media activities and evaluates how their customers perceive their products.
The tool spot important customer conversations on any channel, track your competitors and analyze your brand sentiment against your competitors. You can switch on alerts to get real-time insights.
Pricing:
Hootsuite offers four subscription plans, ranging from $99 to $739 if paid annually. The first two plans have a free 30-day trial, while the others require a demo request.
Competitor Analysis Tools for Content
1. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a content discovery and social media analytics tool that helps businesses find popular content, analyze industry trends, and identify key influencers.
It is one of the best competitive analysis tools for content marketers. You can check out its content engagement on different social channels and its total shares via the web.
Best Features:
- Content Discovery: Allow users to discover popular and trending content in their industry or niche, helping businesses find inspiration for their content creation.
- Social Media Analytics: Provide detailed analytics on social media engagement, including shares, likes, and comments, to assess content performance.
- Influencer research: Find top influencers in your industry and how they help share your competitor’s content.
How to use BuzzSumo for competitive analysis:
BuzzSummo allows you to spy on competitors’ content, identity their top-performing posts, and find content gaps for your marketing strategy.
The tool shows what type of content work well for your competitors and which influencers they work with to share their content.
With its Discover tool, you can figure out any trends and hot topics in your industry and use them for your blog posts.
Pricing:
BuzzSumo offers a free 30-day trial to test the best features. The subscription plans start at $99 per month. You can also pay annually to save 20%.
2. Feedly
Feedly is a content aggregation platform that allows users to curate and organize their favorite websites, blogs, and RSS feeds in one place.
The tool helps you reveal trends and hot topics you can use for your content strategy all on one page.
Best Features:
- Content aggregation: Enable users to collect and organize their favorite websites, blogs, and RSS feeds in one centralized platform for easy access and efficient content consumption.
- Personalization and customization: Offer personalized content recommendations, customizable categories, and the ability to save articles for later.
How to use Feedly for competitive analysis:
Feedly is a good way to track your competitors’ content without constantly looking at it on their blogs.
You can easily subscribe to their RSS feed and set up notifications to analyze all fresh competitors’ content. Feedly has the Browser Add-on to research and store a piece of content worth saving.
Pricing:
Feedly has a free plan on the web and mobile. The paid plans start at $6 per month, billed annually.
3. ContentStudio
ContentStudio is a content marketing and social media management platform that offers features like content discovery, planning, automation, and analytics, all in one place.
The tool shows key social media engagement metrics like shares, comments, and likes your competitors’ content gets. That will reveal their best practices to outperform them and optimize your content for great results.
Best features:
- Content discovery and curation: Let users discover and curate relevant and engaging content from various sources, saving time and enhancing content creation efforts.
- Social media management: Offer built-in social media scheduling, publishing, and automation features.
- White-label customized reports: Get competitor data about their social media performance via email.
How to use ContentStudio for competitive analysis:
Its Competitor Analysis tool benchmarks your social accounts against your top competitors.
That helps detect what types of content perform best on social media and better understand topics and formats their audience loves the most.
The tool provides a snapshot of top social posts published by you and your rivals and makes data-driven decisions for your content strategy.
Pricing:
ContentStudio includes a 14-day free trial and three pricing plans, ranging from $25 to $299 monthly.
4. Ontolo
Ontolo is another powerful SEO tool streamlining the prospecting process for link-building and content marketing opportunities. The tool monitors and analyzes website traffic, backlinks, and content.
Best Features:
- Link Building Prospecting: Assist in finding quality link-building opportunities by automating the process of prospecting for relevant websites.
- Content Marketing Prospecting: Help businesses identify potential content marketing opportunities by discovering relevant topics, influencers, and publishers.
How to use Ontolo for competitive analysis:
The competitor research tool makes the tool stand out from other similar tools. It explores more about your competitors, what type of content they are publishing, and who follows and engages with their content.
It is easy to use the tool: just enter your competitors’ URLs and keywords and get robust data.
Pricing:
Ontolo has three monthly pricing plans, ranging from $97 to $297. You can contact sales to request a custom plan.
5. SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is a web analytics platform that provides insights into website traffic, audience behavior, competitive analysis, and digital marketing strategies.
The tool allows content marketers to dive into competitors’ content and where their traffic comes from.
You can find which topics drive the most traffic and use this information for your content marketing campaign.
Best Features:
- Website Traffic Analysis: Get detailed insights into website traffic, including traffic sources, audience demographics, and engagement metrics.
- Competitive Analysis: Provide data on competitors' website performance, traffic sources, and digital marketing strategies.
How to use SimilarWeb for competitive analysis:
SimilarWeb detects competitors’ referral site traffic and any similar pages they visit.
You can reveal where their traffic comes from, including direct, paid, social, and search traffic. That allows you better understand which resource performs the best.
Pricing:
Contact the official website for pricing information.
Other competitor analysis tools
1. Owletter
Owletter is an email marketing tool that simplifies creating, sending, and tracking email campaigns.
You can easily check out all the emails sent to the mailing list from a website. The tool automatically collects and organizes all your competitors' emails into one simple dashboard.
Best Features:
- Intuitive Email Design: Offer user-friendly tools and customizable templates for creating visually appealing email campaigns.
- Email Performance Tracking: Provide analytics on email metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
How to use Owletter for competitive analysis:
With Owletter, you can see all your competitors’ email marketing activities, from trending topics and SPAM reputation to changes in their email frequency and undiscovered options.
That will help you better understand what works best for them and what doesn’t work. Once changes happen, it will notify you whether there are significant insights.
The best thing is that emails are stored forever; you can see them for analysis anytime.
Pricing:
Owletter has a free 14-day trial to find the best features for your business needs. The subscription plans start at $19 per month.
2. Wappalyzer
Wappalyzer is a highly effective tool that identifies the technologies and tools used on websites, helping businesses understand the technology landscape of their competitors and potential partners.
The tool has an add-on to your browser and can identify any type of software on a specific website.
Best Features:
- Technology Identification: Detect the technologies and tools used on websites.
- Competitive Analysis: Identify competitors' digital capabilities and strategies by analyzing their technology choices.
How to use Wappalyzer for competitive analysis:
This competitor analysis tool measures the success of your competitors’ websites, reveals what software they’re using, and finds any gaps in the technology stack of their websites.
You can easily follow the latest technology trends and compare your website tech against top competitors.
Pricing:
You can use Wappalyzer for free but with limited features. You can use the paid plan to try extended features, starting at $149 per month.
3. VisualPing
VisualPing is a website monitoring tool that alerts users to visual changes on web pages, allowing businesses to track updates, monitor competitors, and ensure the accuracy of critical information in real-time. It acts as a Chrome app that makes tracking websites for any changes easy.
Best Features:
- Visual Change Detection: Detect visual changes on web pages, notifying users when there are updates, modifications, or additions to the content or design.
- Competitor Tracking: Help businesses monitor competitors' websites, tracking any visual changes they make to stay updated on their strategies.
How to use VisualPing for competitive analysis:
VisualPing is a great tool to monitor competitors’ website updates from every 5 minutes to every week.
You can track whether competitors’ changes happen to pricing, search engine optimization, documents, compliance and configuration, and content.
Pricing:
VisualPing has a free plan with limited features. You can use paid plans for professional subscriptions, starting at $10 per month. If you pay annually, you can get two free months.
4. Lusha
Lusha provides accurate contact information, including phone numbers and email addresses, helping businesses connect with prospects and enhance their lead generation and sales efforts.
With its detailed sales and market insights about customer activity, you can easily detect trends and envisage your consumer needs.
Best Features:
- Lead Generation: Assist in finding and verifying contact information for potential leads, streamlining the process of building a high-quality prospect database.
- Prospect Research: Gather valuable insights on prospects by providing information such as job titles, company details, and professional profiles.
- Salesforce and API integrations: Provide automated data enrichment of its CRM and fresh database.
How to use Lusha for competitive analysis:
Lusha extracts high-quality data from different resources, such as LinkedIn, email accounts, and webpages, and shows updated information about their competitors’ prospects.
As the tool provides accurate B2B data and fresh insights, you can better understand your competitors’ clients, optimize your customer experience, and satisfy your customers.
Pricing:
Lusha includes a free plan with limited features. If you want advanced features, try one of its pricing plans, starting at $39 per month per user.
5. ContactOut
ContactOut is a powerful email lookup and contact-finding tool that helps businesses find accurate contact information for professionals and reach out to potential leads effectively.
One of its useful features includes LinkedIn sourcing, a search portal, account identification, and data enrichment.
Best Features:
- Email Lookup: Enable users to find verified email addresses for professionals.
- Contact Finding: Discover contact information for potential leads, including phone numbers and social media profiles.
How to use ContactOut for competitive analysis:
ContactOut is perfect for finding competitors’ email addresses, and quality leads fast from one place.
It acts as a Chrome extension that allows you to get accurate data from work and personal emails, phone numbers, direct dials, and professional and company profiles.
That will save time and effort and avoid old outreach, sales, and recruitment processes.
Pricing:
ContactOut provides a free plan with limited features and two additional monthly plans starting at $49. To request additional users, you can contact sales.
Conclusion
Competitor analysis tools are critical in helping businesses gain a competitive edge and succeed in their respective industries. By leveraging these tools, companies can gather valuable insights into their competitors' strategies, strengths, and weaknesses.