Competitor analysis and tools to perform it are an important, but often overlooked area of business. Even if the process seems dull and all but adrenaline-pumping, it’s the outcome that can give tremendous value. Here’s what it’s all about.

The wisdom of keep your friends close and your enemies closer goes beyond Sun Tzu’s thoughts on war strategy. It’s a school of thought that resonates in business and marketing alike.

Some may wonder is keeping an eye on your competitors a bad thing and the answer is: absolutely not!

It’s the right thing to do for every business that thinks strategically. Competitor analysis and relevant tools have nothing to do with spying or eavesdropping.

Competitor analysis is 100% legal and relies on publicly available data.

Having an in-depth insight into various areas of business and marketing of your competitors has plenty of benefits for your business. With knowledge about your competitors you can:

Understand how to differentiate and stand out

Win over your competitors’ customers

Avoid losses

Predict your competitors moves

Spot emerging threats

Identify gaps

Asses the performance of your business

Identify market opportunities

All in all, It this speaks to you, bear with me.

There’s plenty of business areas that can be analyzed online. Social media presence, marketing campaigns, brand awareness, sentiment, SEO performance, paid ads, backlinks, or PR activities.

Here’s a five tools to tools that can help you look into those areas and gain competitive edge over your competitors:

1. Brand24

One area of business these days we all compete in is the presence in online media. As faintly as it sounds, it can be reduced to a few aspects:

Online sentiment around a business, its product, service, or anything else

Share of voice in their niche

Volume of mentions in online media

Social media reach of content talking about a business

Engagement around content mentioning a business

Most influential authors chatting about a business

Customer feedback

In this context, Brand24 is one of the best competitor analysis tools for the job.

It’s an online media monitoring tool you can use to track web and social media mentions of predefined keywords, that are relevant to your competitors. More than that, the tools offers extensive analytics to put this data into perspective.

If you try it for free, it’s good to start tracking competitors using the following keywords:

Their company name

Their product name

Their service name

Hashtag they use

The name of marketing campaign

Their CEO’s name

Any keyword which is relevant to your business

With an online media monitoring tool, you’re able to track:

What their customers talk about them online?

Are there any influential sources that mention them?

Are they getting a lot of negative and positive customer feedback?

What are their customers’ requests?

What are their product pain-points?

Do they struggle with some fuc*ups?

What are their newest product improvements?

How often their company, product, or hashtag get mentioned online?

What is the social media reach of these mentions?

How fast, and it at all, their recent marketing campaign spreads?

What sources mention them most frequently?

Are they getting a lot of engagement (likes, comments, shares)?

This kind of insight is a source of powerful knowledge you can operate on, and use to fill the market need your competitors are missing out on.

Here are some examples:

By monitoring influential sources that mention your competitors, you discover blogs, websites or authors that are likely to get interested in your business.

You see that the customers of your competitor complain online about something. It so happens that your business is way better at it. In such a case, you need to reach out to the disappointed customers of your competitor and show what you have to offer.

Your competitor launched a hashtag campaign promoting something new. You monitor it and see how it spreads and what’s the response of their audience.

First of all, to collect social mentions about your competitors, you need to create a project and enter relevant keywords:

Then, you’ll see the Summary tab which contains the most important pieces of data regarding your project:

The most popular mentions

Latest mentions.

Numerical summary of your project: the number of mentions, social media reach, interactions, positive and negative mentions.

The most influential profiles and websites mentioning your competitor.

Graphs showing the number of mentions and their social media reach.

The most important information is in the Analysis tab. Check it out, it’s completely free.

2. Similar Web

One of the best competitor analysis tools our there is Similar Web.

Similar Web is a go-to tool for website traffic analysis and much more in paid version. With its help, you can gain the following competitive intelligence:

Volume of traffic: with this knowledge, you can estimate market share of your competitors, at least when it comes to website traffic

Sources of traffic: this knowledge can tell you quantities in which your competitors acquire traffic between paid acquisition, referral, and organic traffic.

Ad display: what ads and where they display them

To compare the performance of your website to your competitor’s, enter your site address first:

Next, provide your competitor’s web address:

In the free version of the tool, you can see global rank, country rank and category rank:

Also, the free version of Similar Web offers traffic overview:

And traffic sources:

These are features you can investigate using the free version of Similar Web.

On the basis of traffic source, you can see the differences between you and your competitors. For example, if you see that your competitor performs well in organic traffic, you can concentrate your efforts on social traffic.

How?

By addressing your audience’s needs and creating highly shareable content.

At the same time, it’ll boost your referral traffic, grow brand awareness, and build your expert authority. In the long run, it’ll also improve your SEO reputation as Google bot likes content that engages readers.

The pro version of Similar Web offers much more in competitor analysis:

Referrals

Social

Display

Content

Audience

Competitors

Mobile apps

3. SEMrush

You say SEO, you think SEMrush.

SEMrush is another great tool you can use for competitor analysis, particularly if you want to compete for users in Google search engine.

Search engine optimization is a fundamental part of online presence. It’s because the quality of your website’s content and its technical performance determines how visible your website in search engines for potential customers is. It’s an arms race to win organic users.

SEMrush is the right tool to screen the SEO performance of your competitors, for example:

Traffic

Organic keywords they rank for

Backlinks they acquire

New and lost keywords

Increases and decreases in rankings

Best performing sites

Paid keywords

Keyword trends

And much more!

Sources of traffic

Similarly, it’s a perfect tool to look after your search engine performance, too.

One of the most valuable pieces of data about your competitor you can get from SEMrush are top organic keywords. This is where you can see the keywords your competitor ranks for for particular URL’s.

In backlinks, you can see all sites that link to your competitor’s site:

How you can use this knowledge?

For example, you can reach out to websites linking to your competitor with a message asking to mention your website, too. Backlinks give massive boost to SEO and increase visibility.

You can try SEMrush for free.

4. Siteliner

We cannot talk about competitor analysis tools without mentioning Siteliner. The tool offers a more technical insight into the performance of your competitor’s website. Technicalities influence a website’s ranking.

Using Siteliner, you can discover weaknesses in website performance of your competitor, for example, broken links, both external and internal

With this kind of knowledge, you can, for example link to your competitor’s broken links. Moz created a great guide for this called The Broken Link Building Guide.

Linking hugely influences Google rankings and without links to your content, you won’t be able to rank high in Google well.

The free version of Siteliner allows analyzing up to 250 pages within one domain.

5. Rank Signals

It’s another competitor analysis tool for SEO.

Using Rank Signals, you can track your competitors backlinks. This will give you an idea of sources that link to your competitor and boost your competitor’s Google ranking.

Rank signals shows you title and URL, link anchor text and URL.

Backlinks add up to your website’s reputation in Google’s eyes. Also, it’s absolutely crucial that sites linking to your site are of good quality. It’s quality over quantity scenario here.

Here you can try Rank Signals for free.

6. Spyfu

Competition expands beyond organic traffic and online presence.

One of ways to acquire search engine traffic is to use GoogleAds and buy yourself exposure. Similarly to organic traffic, competition here is based on keywords. In this case, however, you pay for to display your advertising in top search results, or in other places in Google.

Spyfu is one of the competitor analysis tools you can use to gain insight into paid traffic of your competitors.

The tool lets you see what paid keywords your competitors rank for currently, and ranked in the past.

With Spyfu, you can do much more:

Recognize threats

Track your competitors’ changes in ad spending

See what keywords you buy and your competitors don’t

See suggestions for keyword groups

Sort keywords by cost per click to discover quick wins

Aaaand more!

Check it out just right here.

7. Buzzsumo

When it comes to competitor analysis in social media and content shares, Buzzsumo is your go-to tool here. It’s a social media analytics tool that handles influencer marketing, content marketing, or PR.

With its help, you can discover how social shares of your competitors perform: which networks, who shares their content, and how your content compares against theirs.

Highly shareable content in social media has a few advantages:

It increases brand awareness and helps it spread

It’s a signal for Google that the content is valuable because sparks interest among readers and encourage them to share the value with others

At the same time, Buzzsumo is a sort of a media monitoring tool, because you can get alerts every time your competitor is mentioned online.

8. Alexa

Alexa is a SEO and competitive intelligence software.

The tool consists of a few modules: Keyword Research, Competitive Website Analysis, SEO Analysis, and Target Audience Analysis.

What’s really important here is Target Audience Analysis. You can use it to discover the audience of your competitors and, at the same time, understand the competitive landscape you’re entering. Target Audience Analysis is a source of demographic data which comes useful on numerous occasions: customer persona, content strategy, pid traffic targeting, and more.

Apart than that, you can:

Discover new competitors

Benchmark your site against your competitors: compare your website popularity, traffic sources, and engagement metrics

Discover the share of voice of your competitors for particular keywords

Discover SEO opportunities

You can give Alexa a free try here.

9. Hootsuite

It’s one of the most respected and recognized social media analytics tools in the game. It can help you track the performance of business’ profiles on 35 social media platforms.

Using Hootsuite, you can precisely keep track of social media activities of your competitors.

This is how you can see how they engage their communities, what type of content they post, if they run any contests, and how their marketing campaigns resonate with their audience.

Also, you can keep track of specific keywords and hashtags to be even better informed.

You can test Hootsuite in 30 days for free.

10. Owletter

Owletter is a competitor analysis tool you can use to discover and understand email marketing activities of your competitors.

Owletter gets insights from email messages your competitors send you. Here’s what you can learn about email marketing of your competitors:

SPAM reputation

Do they follow a specific schedule

Changes in frequency

Trends developing over time

Topics they contain

With this kind of knowledge will help you come up with your own email marketing plan that it doesn’t overlap with your competitors.

You can test Owletter in 14 days for free.