13 Awesome SEO Tools To Track Your Competitors

Everybody knows the quote “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

As any successful sports team knows, to get ahead of your competitors, you need to monitor them. While you should NEVER duplicate your competitors’ SEO strategies, it’s important to track them to identify new opportunities and set new goals.

Today, we are going to look at a number of useful tools and resources that can give you insights into your competitors’ web presence.

1. SE Ranking

SE Ranking is an easy-to-use tool that uses different factors to define crucial possibilities for increasing your SEO share in your field. It lets you know which target keywords your competitors are using in SERP. The insights you gain can help you boost your search engine rankings.

 

You can get not only a well-detailed analysis of your main competitors’ rankings, target keywords, and key parameters, but you can also discover backlinks and the strongest links in the context of organic traffic in search. One of SE Ranking’s benefits is getting thorough White Label reports for your clients and the opportunity to build and improve your SEO promotion strategies.

2. BuzzStream

BuzzStream is a time-tested content analytics tool that enables you to analyze top-performing content for any competitor by the number of social media shares on FB, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. The tool shows pages with the most shares from a specific URL and the highest and lowest rankings. Based on this report, you can find topics that can be improved upon and even content gaps that your competitors are not covering.

It has an easy-to-use interface for SEO beginners in order to evaluate the performance of your competitors’ keywords and content. BuzzStream is a great tool to attract the attention of digital influencers and build relationships with the right people. After you find the most powerful authors from the program, you can connect with them and monitor their conversations with other brands.

3. Mention

Mention is a real-time media monitoring tool that lets you track all mentions about your brand–or your competitors’– across web, social media, blogs, videos, news, and forums in one place. It has a very convenient interface where you can view a list of mentions, preview the context of each mention, and figure out whether it’s relevant to your product.

With Mention, it becomes much easier to control everything that is published about your product or brand in the social media and web. All that you need to do is create alerts, specifying words and phrases you want to track on a daily basis. As soon as you get alerts, you can immediately react to your mentions.

4. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is a great free tool that provides website traffic insights of your competitors’ websites. It gathers website data from apps and various toolbars about CTR, traffic, and other parameters. You can see the distribution across the channels and how many leads come from search, referrals, social networks, and much more.

SimilarWeb gives you a good head start running new marketing campaigns and improving existing ones. You can learn the keyword-level tactics that help you save on costs and figure out all organic and paid strategies of your competitors.

 

5. Simply Measured

Simply Measured provides seriously well-detailed competitive insights in the form of charts.  You can track and analyze different profile pages of your competitors on up to 12 social media platforms. The tool comes with 13 free reports on your social media performance that can be automatically generated by the software in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.

All reports include in-depth analysis on demographics and geography, social traffic, and objective measures of social networks. The report will benchmark the last two weeks of activity on your Facebook page against main competitors or other products on Facebook. The tool demonstrates the most significant metrics of the compared profiles and shows customer’s engagement with brand posts.

6. Moat

Moat is a free display network ad tool that helps you monitor all competitors’ ads across the web and the locations where the ads appeared. You just need to enter the name of your brand or your competitor and track all display ads in a few seconds. The tool is designed for brands, agencies, and publishers to visualize the relationships between brands, networks, and other platforms.

7. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a super useful tool to analyze and monitor your competitors’ strategies. The tool is great for competitive analysis and planning outreach. With detailed and powerful graphs, insights, and tables, you can get a ton of information. You can easily check where your main competitors are getting links from. Using this information, you can try to get the same links in your industry and improve your promotion strategy.

You can also discover target keywords that drive traffic for your competitors, helping you understand the rivals’ strategies. If you want to get an extended competitive analysis, you will need the paid version of the tool.

 

8. SpyFu

SpyFu is one of my blue-eyed boys that lets me know what target keywords your competitor is using in organic and paid search. It has a very easy-to-use interface where you simply enter your competitor and get an entire list of keywords. One of its unique features is showing the most valuable keywords that product high-value clicks month after month.

The tool also identifies how difficult it will be to get the first position in Google search with a certain keyword so you don’t waste and money doing on-page SEO for a keyword that won’t bear fruit. What I don’t like is that you can only gather actionable insights for USA and UK, which is bad for companies with worldwide operations.

9. Adbeat

Adbeat is another awesome advertising tool that uncovers competitors’ display ads in search and figures out the most effective landing pages and ad copy. The tool shows where your rivals are spending money. If you need data only for the US, the tool will be perfect for your needs, but it also has limited data for other countries.

10. Social Bakers

With Social Bakers, you can track fan growth by times and days on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube and figure out the most well-received content by your audience on different platforms. This is one of the most expensive of the tools, but it is really worth that price.

11. SpyOnWeb

SpyOnWeb is a popular research tool for marketers who want to discover their competitor’s IP addresses and other domain information.  The tool searches for all websites that belong to the same company. You just need to type a domain and you will get a list of different IP addresses and a list of domains that have the same IP address.

12. SERPstat

SERPstat is a new competitor research tool that shows the visibility of your websites and your competitors in organic and paid Google results. I love the option to visualize the data of the most visible pages for your rivals. The tool has a very useful feature to analyze subdomains with the ability to export results in Excel.

13. Ispionage

Ispionage is a great solution to track competitors’ activities and find the best performing keywords in search. The tool shows how much they spend on organic and paid search and browses landing pages on which they are getting traffic from ads. You can also analyze the most effective ad copy of your rivals and view the data in graphic form.

Your Turn

Again, you don’t want to copy what your competitors are doing online, but these tools can help you make informed decisions. What tools do you use to monitor competitors? Have you tried out any of the above-mentioned tools? Share your ideas and thoughts in the comments below.