Best 5 Tools You Can Use for SEO Competitive Analysis

As it is almost impossible to be the sole producer of a product or service, there will always be competition. And with millions of content going to the web each day, SEO has become a very competitive endeavor.

You might have the best content today, a top-notch SEO strategy. But never get that much organic traffic. Why? Because your target audience has somehow found their way to your competitors! And these competitions of yours are doing their best to retain their customers.

So, is it that they are doing it better than you? Or they’ve been in the business far longer than you? Today, what I offer you is the least explored part of SEO. And that is carrying out an analysis on your competitions.

We will introduce you to the best tools you can use to understand your competitors. When you do, it becomes easier to outrank them. Ready? Let’s go!

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is probably the number one tool for researching your competitors. With Ahrefs, you can do such things as check your competitors’ backlinks. Now, you must know SEO has two main pillars. Those are the on-page and off-page optimization.

The off-page deals mainly with backlinks as it builds up your page’s authority and makes your page more reliable. Backlinks themselves are other authentic websites linking back to yours. With Ahrefs, you can check your competitors’ backlinks and even reach out to them to build your backlinks.

With Ahrefs, you also can see your competitors’ organic traffic and go through their most engaging content. By so doing, you get more insight into the content gap between you and your competitors. And you can plan better for your future content.

However, this is still not all Ahrefs offers. Not only can you follow up on your competitors’ organic efforts. You can also check out their PPC campaigns, keywords, and landing pages. But this is only one tool of the ton. Read on to learn of the other alternatives that might work well for your goal.

Semrush

Consider how nice it will be for you to get live feeds of your competitors who are also ranking/targeting similar keywords. These are your main organic competitors, and Semrush allows you access to them.

By learning their use of these keywords, and what makes their effort slightly better than yours, you get to master how to outrank them.

Also, like Ahrefs, you get to study your competitors’ traffic. You understand more about their audience and lead generation sources. And even their marketing strategies.

Google

Of course! If you are learning more about who currently outranks you, you might as well find them on the search engine page itself. While it doesn’t give you the data in a meaningful format like the above tools, it is still one indispensable tool. And here’s how you use it.

After carrying out your keyword research and you have them listed. The next thing you really should do is input this on your search bar and see who’s already ranking for that keyword.

Check their content and see how you can do better. Check out who’s linking to them and see if they would link back to you. Make sure to study the keyword’s density and even the page’s design.

You should know that even the outlook of your page is critical to keeping your audience hooked. They’d most likely be back for more if you give them a good experience while going through your stellar content. And would even tell others about your page by sharing it.

Another lovely thing about Google is how you can check your page speed and how to improve it. Apart from your content and outlook, your page loading speed is something else to improve. The longer your page takes to load, the lesser people you’d have on your page.

PageOptimizer Pro

Well, this focuses more on the on-page optimization analysis. You get to discover how you and your competitors rank for your keywords. PageOptimizer Pro shows you what they are doing that makes their strategy slightly better than yours. And as stated earlier, it’s more on-page focused. So, it covers everything about your on-page copy and the metadata.

Alexa Traffic Rank

We are sure that you’re familiar with Alexa. After all, it’s something every Amazon user knows. The traffic rank tool works well as an extension for your Chrome browser. It readily shows you where your competitors are getting their traffic. And you also get to see what they do to get it.

Conclusion

Now, are these all the tools out there for competitive analysis? No! There’s still SpyFu, which is a lovely tool to consider too. But with all you have currently on this page, you can be sure it’s only a matter of time before you’re a top competitor yourself.

Only put in the extra time and work to analyze others, and the first search engine page will be just for you.

To read more about the Keyword Research, check out The Ultimate Keyword Research Guide for SEO article.