Top 12 competitor analysis tools you need to use

If you type the kind of services your company offers with a location, for example, digital marketing agencies in Bangalore into Google search and hit the search button, it will show you about millions of results. Millions, yes. 

Do you see how fierce the competition is? There are hundreds of companies like you out there doing the same thing you are doing, providing similar services and products. Where do you stand against your competition?

To beat them and outrank them on the SERPs, you need to understand how they market themselves, what strategies they are executing that deliver them excellent results, their posts and content on social media, and more. 

With these tools listed below categorized according to strategies, you can spy on your competition.

1. Quick Search - For social media

Talkwalker’s Quick Search, a social media search engine is an excellent tool that gives you an overview of your brand and your competitor’s social media performance. 

With this tool, you can find - 

• Trending content ideas

• Influencers

• What the influencers are talking about you

• What is being said about your brand

• Trends in your industry

• Track your competitors’ activity

• Audience demographics, and mentions

Audience demographics

• Measure your brand’s impact on social media with KPI frameworks

• What’s happening on multiple networks - social media, news, forums, blogs, and more. 

You can enter 5 brands similar to yours and compare them with yours. The tool will provide you insights on their performance, areas you’re lacking in, and find ideas for content that will create a big impact on the audience. 

You can also compare the share of countries or regions with their map feature. 

Price - The basic pricing of Quick Search is $9,600/year. 

2. Phlanx - For calculating social media engagement

Phlanx is a social media engagement calculator that comes in handy when you want to find out how much engagement your competition is getting, compared to your brand. 

Features - 

• Influencer directory

• Audit Instagram influencers to find how many real followers they have

• Collaboration with other brands to promote each other

• Engagement calculator for Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter

The engagement ratio is calculated by the number of followers versus likes and comments from those followers. Higher the follower count, the lesser the engagement rate. 

• Campaign manager

• Competitor’s social media tracking

• Product trials, and more.

Price - Phlanx offers free trials for a month. It’s worth the price as it helps you provide the data and information you need to outrank your competition. The starting price is $25/month with one user. 

3. Sprout Social - For social media

Sprout provides an all-in-one social management solution that offers your competitor’s results. 

The best thing about this tool is that it comes with a listening tool that gives you deeper insights into what works for your industry, what resonates with your audience, and where you need to adjust your strategy to distinguish your brand from the competitors.

It also provides a comparison of key performance metrics like share of voice, engagement, sentiment, and impressions across all social networks. 

You can use the competitor’s report to track audience growth, engagement rate, post volume for every network. You can use these reports to compare with your own. 

4. SimilarWeb - For content and SEO

Discover potential leads, partners, and identify emerging trends to help your brand grow with SimilarWeb, a free competitor analysis tool.

It collects raw data, organizes, and processes it by learning algorithms, creates statistics, and delivers it to you. 

With this tool, you can - 

• Benchmark against your competitors and industry

• Determine your competitor’s referral traffic

• Find where the site sends its visitors to

• Find what topics your visitors search for

• Find industry trends and strategies

• Compare web and app performance against your competitors

• Find your competitor’s content marketing strategy

Price - It’s free!

5. Buzzsumo - For content analysis

Buzzsumo is a popular tool used to find content ideas that are engaging, content that is popular, do keyword research, and more. 

It can also be used to analyze your competition. You can find which of their content is shared most and get detailed reports of their performance, average shares by the network, content format, and length. 

With Buzzsumo, you can find - 

• Who is sharing and linking to your competitor’s content

• How often your competitors are publishing content

• Review their top-performing content by engagement and backlinks

• Compare the performance of your content with your competitors

• Identify the most popular content topics and which are most successful

• Find social networks where they are gaining the most traction

Price - there’s a free trial for 30 days. Pricing starts at $99/month and $79/year.

6. Owletter - For emails

Get emails from your competitor with Owletter. It automatically captures emails sent from a website to their mailing lists and stores them. It takes a screenshot of the emails and analyses them. It alerts you if it finds any important ones and takes note of your competitor’s email pattern and behavior. 

With Owletter, you can find out - 

• If your competitor has a reputation for being spammy

• If schedule their emails for sending

• How often they send, change the frequency

• Discover trending topics

• What your competitors did the previous years

With Owletter, you can store every email and never lose them. The whole team can have access to the captured emails.

Price - Starting $19/month 

7. iSpionage - For analyzing paid ads

If you want to know about your competitors’ paid ads, then iSpionage is the tool to go. It can get you access to data on SEO and PPC keywords that’s as old as seven years. It shows the data covered by Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

For competitor analysis, you can use this tool to analyze your competitor’s target PPC keywords, PPC campaigns, their monthly spend, and who else is targeting a particular PPC ad and topic. 

Price - Starting from $59/month.

8. WooRank - For SEO

WooRank is an SEO checker and an SEO audit tool. It can also track your competitors’ SEO and keyword rankings. With this tool, you can integrate Google tracking data with social media data easily

Learn how to do an SEO audit and analysis with this digital marketing online course.

You can use the tool to compare your brand and your competitors’ based on the following metrics -

• Technical SEO

• Search Rankings

• Backlink quality

• Engagement from social media

• Performance of the site

Price - $59/month

9. Wappalyzer - For software analysis

Wappalyzer is a free competitor analysis tool, more like an add-on of Firefox. It shows different software that is running on specific websites. You can click on one of your competitor’s websites and find out what software they are using!

This helps you understand what makes their website perform well, what sets it apart from the rest, and more. This feature makes Wappalyzer a unique tool to work with. 

Price - It’s completely free!

10. Majestic - For checking backlinks

A wonderful tool to check who all are linking to you or your competition!  It acts like a search engine and can crawl large sites. The tool provides all kinds of information such as - 

• Number of external backlinks

• Referring domains

• Referring IPs

• Referring subnets

• Report of languages of incoming anchor texts

• Trust flow

• Citation flow

• Link density

• Backlink history

• Anchor text and more. 

Do we need more? The incredible layout this tool gives about your competitor’s links are more than useful. You’ll get a deeper understanding of their search rankings.

Price - starting $50/month

11. Netpeak Checker - For SERP scraping

Let this tool be your lifesaver! Unlike many tools used for competitor analysis, Netpeak lets you check for bulk SEO analysis and websites. Imagine what you can do by comparing and analyzing all your competitors at once! And at a high speed too.

Some of the features are - 

• Check more than 1200 URL parameters

• Compare them with that of Ahrefs, SEMrush, Serpstat, Moz, etc.

• Examine on-page SEO factors to optimize your website for search engines and rankings

• Check bulk index and cache in Google, Yahoo, and Bing

• Use proxies and CAPTCHA solving services

• Review domain age, expiration date, and those available for purchase

• Analyze the social media performance of a website.

Price - Starting $15/month

12. Rank Signals

A free competitor analysis tool to check backlinks sources, Rank signals helps you find and identify your competitors’ best links which is an effective way for building strategy. 

With this tool, you can find - 

• Your competitors’ best links

• Link signals and metrics - Pagerank, Alexa rank, internal & external link ratio

• Identify broken and spam links

• Identify and tag links which are nofollow

• Metrics and data for social networks

Price - It’s free!

Which competitor analysis tool do you use? Let us know in the comments!

If you’re keen on learning how to do competitor analysis or SEO, or social media marketing or you want to learn digital marketing, then head over to  Learn Digital Academy. They are the best digital marketing training in Bangalore.