15 Online Competitor Analysis Tools to Spy on Your Competition

Competitor Analysis Tools: Competitive analysis is highly essential for brands to keep track of the strategies and techniques imposed by competitors. It can be implemented or upgraded to stand out in the crowd. 

Know the Definition of Competitive Analysis

Detailed competition analysis is a productive remedy that helps you keep track of how your competitors are improvising the content marketing strategies and link building to help make their business thrive. The businesses implement this technique to overtake their adapted measures and ensure better productivity in the long run. 

Spying on competitor’s websites helps you to get ideas for making your website stronger than your competitor. Still, you can also check whether your competitor’s website has copied anything similar to that of your website. 

You need ideal tools to make sure that your analysis can be done seamlessly and without much hassle. Analyzing business competitors with the right approach will help ensure more visitors to your website and eventually better sales. 

The necessity for Integrating Competitive Analysis

The sole answer to this question is determining the strengths and weaknesses of the business competitors. Knowing about your competitors in detail would eventually give your business a productive advantage to implement new measures and eradicate the barriers that are preventing your business from surpassing the competitor. 

The first step that you must take in the pursuit of analysis is identifying the potential business ideologies that are competing against you in the same market. To do this, you need to observe the market from the customer’s point of view. By doing this, you would be able to group the competitors in accordance with the buyer responses. 

After grouping the competitors, you need to identify their loopholes or weak points on which you can take a leap. Some of the weak aspects that you must look for is missing assets, skills or others that are truly essential for business productivity. Once you get knowledge about their strengths and weaknesses, you can make your business surpass the demands of your competitor. 

There are many different types of data that you need to collect through analysis strategies. Those types of data include:

• Link popularity
• Search engine ranking
• Content performance
• Keyword usage
• Web traffic
• Social media metrics, etc.

For accumulating detailed competitor data, you need to choose the right tool that has the adequate features essential for helping you out with required details and data. Not all the tools can assist you in deriving all types of data. Therefore, you need to make your choices wisely while you are picking up any of the efficient analysis tools. 

Know the Different Types of Competitors

In terms of business agenda, there are three types of competitors, direct, indirect and replacement competitors. Each type of competitor has different attributes that match with your company’s marketing strategies. Here is a detailed explanation of how these type of competitors impact your business:

Direct Competitor

Direct competitor, as the name suggests, is the face-off competitor for your business who deals with the same products & services that you offer. Not just that, they also have the same targeted market as that of yours. They are adapting the same strategies as that of you to reach out to the mutual customer base. 

They will have the same end goals and are possibly adopting the same business model as that of you to thrive in the current market. Therefore, identifying this category of competitors is highly essential to assist your business solutions to stay unique. Moreover, you can also use the respective tools for finding potential direct competitions for locating the right market for establishing business operations. 

Indirect Competitor

Indirect competitors are companies who deal with the same services and products as that of you but with a different mindset. The strategy for growing revenue for such competitors is different from direct competitors. 

Many companies also seek an analysis of indirect competitors to ensure a better idea of how they are paving their business path. You can either adapt their strategies or improve yours to ensure better business productivity. 

Replacement Competitor

Replacement competitors are also known as phantom competitors who deal with services or products completely different from that of yours. Even though the products, services, and categories of business are different, they are an alternative for the products or services that you offer. If the customers prefer to spend money on their product instead of yours, then they are your replacement competitors. 

You need to implement productive strategies to ensure you do a detailed analysis to adapt strategies so that the consumers prefer your products over the replacements or alternatives. 

Best Competitor Analysis Tools for SEO

1. MozBar

MozBar is one of the best tools for SEO that is essential for implementation in order to get a detailed look at the authority metrics of other brand’s webpage. It will help determine the number of links that are set for redirecting the visitors to that webpage. 

MozBar can also help you find keyword competitiveness aspects to help you with keyword research. It has a pro & free version that you can avail based upon your needs and requirements. With the metrics associated with the domain authority, page authority and backlinks, identifying the strength of the competitor in the search engine listing is easy.

The Moz Pro pricing over the official site is stated as:

• Standard plans can be bought at $99 per month.
• Medium plan can be bought at $149 per month.
• Large plan can be bought at $249 per month.
• Premium plans can be bought at $599 per month. 

2. Ahref

Ahref is one of the efficient tools for high-end rank tracking. Ahref is designated to help with rank-tracking of over 500 million different keywords. Along with that, you can do a detailed analysis and analyze all the internal backlinks of your competitor’s business website. You get the ability to locate the link prospects and also monitor the outbound links of your website. 

You can check the ranking history of any of the competitor’s websites related to any of the keywords for a healthy comparison. Not just that, but Ahref is also an adequate tool to help you fill the gaps in your content strategies as compared to your competitor’s website. 

Ahref has a paid pricing plan that is available in different packages.

The pricing includes:

• The lite plan of Ahref is $99 per month, and you can buy your trial for a mere $7 with seven days access to all features. 
• The standard plan of Ahref is $179 per month, and you can start a trial for this plan at $7. 
• The advanced plan of Ahref costs $399 per month.
• The agency plan for Ahref costs $999 per month.

Each of these plans differs from one another in terms of feature access. Based on your needs and requirements, you can opt for the ideal plan. 

3. SEMRush

SEMRush is yet another popular tool that helps you keep track of the competitor’s strategies and their results. SEMRush will help you look after the insights of potential competitors due to display advertising, link building, and organic traffic. Along with that, you can also analyze the keywords that are performing best for the competitors. It has several dedicated tools, especially for Competitor SEO Analysis, market analysis, etc. 

SEMRush tracks the display ads of your competitors to help you find the right keyword for your PPC and SEO campaigns. You just need to log onto SEMRush and enter your competitor’s URL and choose the country for which you want to analyze. Once you have done that, you can go ahead and select the type of data you want to extract your competitors.

Some of the common features of SEMRush include:

• It helps in position tracking.
• It assists the businesses in the semantic core collection
• Get backlinks analytics and audit reports.
• SEO auditing feature.

The plans and pricing for SEMRush are categorized in terms of budget and features to help give options to online marketers.

The pricings include:

• Pro plan can be bought at $99.95 per month.
• Guru plan can be bought at $199.95 per month.
• Business can be bought at $399.95 per month.
• Enterprise plans can be bought for custom marketing needs, and the price might vary. 

You can seek free trial for the Pro and Guru Plan to check out the features before you could avail it.

Best Competitor Analysis Tools for Content Marketing

4. Ontolo

Ontolo is one of the most popular tools for content marketing aspects. Ontolo helps find prospects for your link building, content, SEO, competition, social, sales, eCommerce, advertising and others. Along with that, Ontolo also has some of the technical features that include search form, Geo-IP tracking, Web analytics, video analytics and others. 

Ontolo has a prospecting application with pricing that varies from $97 to $297 per month for different plans. The major strategies imposed on Ontolo are blogger outreach, directories, influencer outreach, resource linking, blog rolls and others.

The pricing detail break down in terms of packages is:

• Pro plan can be bought at $97 per month.
• Agency plans can be bought at $297 per month.
• You can go for a custom plan infusing your desired features at a varying price. 

Ontolo has a 30 days money-back guarantee to give you a complete refund in case you do not like the features offered. So, just explore without worrying about the money spent. You have 30 days to judge the beneficiary outcome and decide whether the plan is fruitful or not. 

5. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is an adequate solution to help your business get a private investigator for keeping a track on the competitor’s strategies. BuzzSumo can help you analyze the top contents that are being shared around the internet by the influencers and mentioned preferably. The free version of the platform will allow you to take up four searches in a day, whereas taking the paid version will give you complete access. 

There are different paid versions for you to avail based on your needs and budget.

Different features come at different pricing based on BuzzSumo plans that include:

• Pro plan can be bought at $99 per month for five users.
• Plus plan can be bought at $179 per month for ten users.
• Large plan can be bought at $299 per month for 15 users.
• Enterprise plan can be bought at $499 and above for 30 users. The price in this plan will vary based upon your customizations in it.

6. Feedly

The business owners today are planning on integrating effective solutions to stay up-to-date with content marketing trends. Feedly is one of the efficient tools that can help online marketers stay updated in the market by analyzing the competitor blogs along with the RSS feeds. It is basically an application and is easy to use. 

It is an online software tool that is meant for setting up blogs for tracking and doing industry research. It will help you stay ahead of the competitors and find potential content that can be relevant and productive for your business.

There is a free plan of Feedly, but you can also avail the paid subscriptions at cheap rates that include:

• Pro plan can be bought at $6 per month when billed annually.
• Pro+ plan can be bought at $8.25 per month when billed annually.
• Business plan can be bought at $18 per month when billed annually.
• Enterprise plan can be bought as per the customization that you make.

7. Similarweb

SimilarWeb is the analysis tool that helps you find out the total amount of traffic that all the other websites get. You will get the chance to take a look at the traffic source of the competitors. The analysis of the traffic sources is further categorized into six categories that will include keywords, social traffic, sites and others. 

You get two plans that you can avail with SimilarWeb, i.e., either free or enterprise. In the free plan, you get five results per metric, web traffic data of 3 months and mobile-app data of one month. If you are taking the Enterprise plan, you might need to talk to the consultant of SimilarWeb to tailor the plan according to your needs. 

Competitor Analysis Tools for Industries, Ads, & Emails

8. Mailcharts

MailCharts is an ideal tool that is meant for analysis for emails and ads. It lets you browse email examples to get deep insight and knowledge about the trends. MailCharts can help you with advanced email search, brand overviews, industry metrics, email reports and a lot more. Not just that but Mailcharts extracts the emails from the campaigns run by the competitors to implement it onto your business. 

It compares your campaign with the leading marketing emails to ensure that your practices are staying on the top.

There are four plans for you to avail under MailCharts that include:

• • The free plan that is meant for tracking three companies.
  • Starter plan can be bought at $99 per month for tracking ten companies.
  • Business plan can be bought at around $249 per month for tracking 25 companies.
  • Enterprise plan can be bought at around $999 per month for tracking over 100 companies. 

9. iSpionage

The iSpionage tool is used for analyzing the landing pages of the competitors. Moreover, it also gives you suggestions to improve the user experience of your landing page by taking an idea from the competitor website. It also helps you adapt the PPC keywords that your competitors have infused to overtake their sales and traffic count. 

The pricing of iSpionage is categorized into different plans that include:

• • The starter plan can be bought at $59 per month.
  • The professional plan costs can be bought at $99 per month.
  • Advanced plan can be bought at $299 per month.
  • You can also take up custom solutions as per your needs and budget.

10. Owletter

Owletter is a popular analysis tool for competitors that is used for capturing, analyzing and storing the competitor’s email. It means that you can keep track of the email of your competing brands and check out what is working effectively for them. With Owletter, you will get an idea whether your competing brands have any kind of spam reputation or do they schedule their emails. 

The pricing plans of Owletter include different packages for giving the online marketers options to choose from.

The pricing plans include:

• • The starter pack can be bought at $19 per month for monitoring ten websites.
  • The pro pack can be bought at $39 per month for monitoring 25 websites.
  • Unlimited pack can be bought at $79 per month for monitoring unlimited websites.  

11. Owler

Owler is yet another proficient tool that is used for researching competitors, partners, key customers and other relevant competitions to ensure your business productivity. Owler can also help you get an insight into the competitor’s business revenue, count of employees and all recent news as well. 

The Owler tool has some designated pricing plans for giving options to business owners and online marketers.

The plans include:

• • The basic plan is completely free of cost for analysis of 10 companies in a month and many more features.
  • Plus plan is available at $99 per year, meant for personal use to see 50 companies in a month.
  • Pro plan is available at $420 per year, which is meant for marketers and professionals for seeing and tracking unlimited companies. 

Competitor Analysis Tools for Social Media

12. Keyhole

Social media monitoring is a quite tough task as it has a lot of information to consider. But Keyhole is here to help the businessmen and online marketers get accurate analysis reports of the competitors. Keyhole is integrated for helping you get a data analysis, easy reports, sentiment analysis, and social media analysis. 

Keyhole is going to help you listen to everything that is being talked about you or your competitors across social media. They monitor social media campaigns and keep track of influencer marketing. Along with that, some of the other key features of Keyhole are brand monitoring, market research and event monitoring.

There are three plans for Keyhole social media analysis that includes:

• • Professional plan can be bought at $179 per month.
  • Corporate plan can be bought at $539 per month.
  • Enterprise plan can be bought at $999 per month. 

13. Social Mention

Social Mention is a social media monitoring tool that has the basic functionality of helping the businesses get adequate information on who is talking about your brand over diverse social media platforms. Social Mention does it in real-time, and you can do a lot more over the platform other than social media analysis. You can gain customer insights, maintain online brand reputation, run sentiment analysis, and much more. 

Social Mention is a free tool that is used for social media listening that helps you monitor all the platforms for detailed analysis of real-time conversations about your brand and your competitors. Not just that, but you can also create influencer marketing strategies for better business profit.

14. Phlanx

Phlanx is a social media analysis tool for online marketers and businesses. It helps you know whether the followers of a competitor brand on social media platforms are active or not. They also monitor the aspects in detail to ensure the social platform presence of the competitor. 

It is an engagement calculator that predicts the engagement of the brand by considering the number of followers and the number of people interacting with the content.

The pricing of Phlanx is divided into three packages that include:

• • The basic plan of Phlanx can be bought at $35 per month.
  • The premium plan can be bought at $50 per month.
  • The business plan can be bought at $70 per month.

15. Social Blade

Social Blade is an amazing tool used for keeping an eye on the bigger brands by assessing their count of followers on different social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and others. Social Blade offers a daily update on follower counts to help the businesses keep track of the competitor’s social presence. Not just that, but Social Blade has an ability to stack the brand social media presence over each other. 

The pricing of Social Blade is divided into different plants in terms of features and pricing. They are:

• • Bronze plan for $3.99 per month
  • Silver plan for $9.99 per month
  • Gold plan for $39.99 per month
  • Platinum plan for $99.99 per month

Conclusion

Are you still in a dilemma of whether to use these tools or not? What tools do you prefer for your analysis? Ask yourself if it is working well to help you get better traffic on your website and help you find better keywords for ensuring better productivity for the business.