SEO has never been any more difficult than it is nowadays. It has become a tough game and if you want to be resting on that 1st page which everyone is trying for then you need to keep an eye on your competitors too.
It’s basic and everyone knows that initially when you start a new website, there are a number of things which you should do. But when you reach a level where your pages are dancing between page 1 and 2 of Google, this is where you need to look out and check what your competitors are doing.
Because you cannot simply hit the top unless you know what others around you are doing. Fortunately, there are a number of tools which can help you look into what your competitor is doing. There are tools for everything separately. Using such tools, you can look into your competitor’s backlinks, keywords, stats, speed and much more.
Here in this guide, we have highlighted 5 best SEO tools for competitor analysis. These tools do different tasks and tell you data on a whole new range. Using these tools you can easily get to see what is the thing which you are missing and your competitor is taking advantage of.
So here we go,
Table of Contents
1 AHREFS
Ahrefs is one of the best tools on the internet for website analysis right now. It’s not a specific tool for one thing only. It has a ton of features inside it. It lets you do certain things like keyword research, checking backlinks and referring domains and check the content of the site and also do a site audit.
Ahrefs claims that it has 1.1 B pages in its database and 1.2 M new pages are indexed every day. This makes it very clear that if you want to check your competitor’s backlinks and referring domain, then Ahrefs is the best go to option.
Here is how you can check your competitor’s backlinks. In the tool on the top, you have to select site explorer and enter your competitor’s website name. By doing so, you will see a preview of UR, DR, Backlinks and Referring Domains etc.
Now click on Backlinks and you will direct towards a new page. Here you have a ton of options to customize the search. You can choose the platform type (blog, forum, e-commerce etc.). You can also choose if you want to see NoFollow, DoFollow or both type of links. Additionally, you can also set the traffic on the page. In case you only want to see links which have high traffic, you can do that very easily.
And finally, you can very easily export the lists in .csv format for use in Excel workbooks.
2 SPYFU
SpuFu is a keyword analysis tool. You will come across lots of keyword research tools in your career. But the reason SpuFu beats them all is their massive data. They have over 5 Billion indexed results which are a massive number. This amount of data lets you easily check your competitor’s keywords and steal them.
Using this software is very easy, you just have to open the tool and enter your competitor’s domain. That is, now it will take you to a page where you can see both organic and paid keywords for which your competitor is currently ranking. From here you can easily export all the results in csv or pdf format.
3 SEMRUSH
SEMRUSH is something which every webmaster should be using. No matter what niche and level you are working on, you always need a tool which will tell you if you are going the right or the wrong way. Same as Ahrefs, SEMRUSH tells you a number of things like SERPs, Keywords, Traffic Volume, Ranking Positions and Backlinks.
No doubt that Ahrefs index on Backlinks is enormously bigger than SEMRUSH. But SEMRUSH is way better in other things like constantly spying on your competitor keywords and other things.
You get to see real-time insights on traffic, keywords, backlinks and a lot. Another good thing about SEMRUSH is that it automatically detects your competitors based on your keywords and other things. And being honest, the competitors told to you by SEMRUSH are you, real competitors.
4 BUZZSUMO
Social Networks have been playing an important role in overall SEO. And Brian Dean even mentioned that Social Signal was a strong ranking factor. It may not be that much-storing signal nowadays but it still matters. Because social networks site can get you tons of traffic and now e random traffic, you can target traffic of your choice.
This is where BuzzSumo comes into play. It’s a tool using which you can check what is the most viral and trending topic in your niche. You can get to know what top will bring in more traffic towards your site. What type for content will grab users and which won’t?
You simply have to put in the topic you want to know about, for example, “SEO”. Now, this toll will pop-up all the results from search engines which are related to SEO and has been widely shared across social platforms like Facebook Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest etc.
In simple words, the results that you see here will be the most trending and hot topics related to SEO. Additionally, these are also the topics which have massive chances of getting shared across social networks by the readers themselves.
5 MOZ
Like Ahrefs and SEMRUSH, MOZ is an SEO tool which tells you lots of things altogether. You get to see similar metrics like keywords you are ranking for, referring domains, backlinks etc. But there is something unique too.
Two things which set apart MOZ are Link Intersect and Spam Score. Using link intersect you can get to know about websites which are a link to more than one competitor of yours. This clearly means that if a website is a link to 2 or more competitors, then it is good chances that the same website will link to you as well.
The next things are Spam Score, here you can get to know the spam score of the website from which you intend to get a link from. In simple words, the spam score tells you what the chances of a website to be penalized are?
So, always try to get links from websites which have a low spam score. Of course, it is impossible that all your referring domain have low spam score, but if you try to keep it low then you can control it up to an extent.
Final Thoughts:
These were are some of the most famous and widely used SEO tools for competitor analysis. As mentioned in the very start, if you don’t keep an eye out on your competitors, you won’t be able to snatch good positions on the first page.
But if you know about what your competitors are doing and you try and do better than them, then definitely you can get higher rankings easily.
This post has been contributed by Truman Mills from segmentblue.com
