The 8 Best Competitive Research Tools for IT Pros marketing to know about marketing and presence on the Internet, we do not live in a bubble where only our actions have repercussions on ourselves. On the contrary, our businesses are largely influenced by the market as a whole and by what our competitors are doing.
It is essential to understand where we fit into the puzzle of marketing, what actions we could do differently and how to do better than our competitors. Competitive analysis tools can help you answer these questions with the data they provide about which competitors are performing better than yours and what you can do to change the situation.
In this article, we have carefully selected seven powerful and comprehensive tools that will allow you to collect as much data as possible. These tools, reliable and regularly updated, are particularly useful for marketing professionals and allow them to save a lot of time.
1. The SEMrush Traffic Analysis Tool
Most of the tools in this article are excellent for either task, and some of them offer a more extensive suite of tools. SEMrush, meanwhile, is proud to offer you an absolutely complete suite of marketing tools that can generate a very valuable competitive analysis. For competitive research and performance comparison, the SEMrush Traffic Analysis tool is a must.
It is an all-in-one tool that quickly provides you with data statistics on a competitor's website traffic. It allows you to compare your performance to that of one of your competitors or to compare your competitors with each other. With clear graphics (which can be exported to PNG), you can instantly get a clear picture of your competitive landscape, from traffic overview to targeted landing page performance.
The SEMrush traffic analysis tool provides you with data on a variety of indicators. You can see the main landing pages from your site and your competitors' sites and compare metrics such as visit time, number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic sources and traffic by geographic area. You can also see if you share common audiences with your competitors.
In addition to Traffic Analysis, SEMrush offers a variety of competitive search tools. These allow you to see the keywords for which your competitors are getting organic or paid positioning, and how much they pay if any. You can access their backlinks profiles and experience their performance on various social platforms thanks to social network analysis features.
End-to-end, all this information gives you a realistic panoramic view of your competition, which is more useful than a handful of basic data.
Why did we select this tool? SEMrush's traffic analysis is most useful for comparing targeted competitors, researching new markets and industries, and finding areas where strategic and tactical actions are needed.
In addition, to date, SEMrush offers the most complete and comprehensive suite of tools.
2. SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is an analytics program that allows you to perform a variety of tasks ranging from discovering new competitors to identifying the strategies they are likely to use. In addition to keeping an eye on your performance, you can compare your performance metrics with those of your competitors and better determine your position relative to them.
To do this, the platform provides you with data on referring traffic, marketing channels, general engagement, traffic and search terms, etc. You can even see who owns the most popular pages and analyze them. SimilarWeb also has a large audience data platform.
With them, you can identify the sectors from which your target audience is coming and see the traffic and audience segments of your competitors. This is essential because you might discover important segments of your audience that you did not know existed. In addition, this tool gives you information on how you can improve interaction with these segments, especially since you can keep an eye on your competitors whose sales funnels have the best conversion rates.
Why did we select this tool? The analytical features of SimilarWeb are powerful as a whole; but what makes the uniqueness of this tool is the visualization of the funnels. It's incredibly helpful to be able to analyze your conversions and find out which competitors are doing better than you.
3. Sprout Social
Sprout Social has a detailed competitive analysis tool that collects information based primarily on social media data, including social listening.
This competitive analytics platform can provide you with a lot of information about what people are saying about your competitors, and it allows you to keep an eye on what they are doing. In addition, you have access to information about their best social media publications, their overall engagement, and social media growth.
This tool gives you an overview of the general content strategies of your competitors; he reveals to you the subjects they are addressing; it tells you what content appeals to your audience and it helps you take stock of your content.
The disadvantage of Sprout Social is that this tool is mainly focused on social networks. If in this area Sprout Social is able to provide you with very useful data that most other tools do not provide, it does not come close to them when it comes to general site analysis data. what are you looking for?
Why did we select this tool? Sprout Social's social listening and social analytics tools let you know what people are saying about your competitors and what they are doing on social media. You get information about their strategies and the general opinion of Internet users about them.
4. Wappalyzer
Wappalyzer is a very targeted tool; he does only one task, but in a grand way. This add-on Firefox instantly informs you of the technologies that are used on the site you are viewing.
Many tools use extensions for Chrome, so if you're a Firefox aficionado, Wappalyzer has a definite advantage. In addition, it is easy to use and provides unavailable data in most other tools presented in this article.
Take an interest in the technologies and extensions your competitors use. For example, you might notice that all of your competitors with good SERP Yoast plugins to optimize their pages for certain keywords.
Or that your competitors with the highest number of sales use email software, such as MailChimp , supporting auto-responder campaigns.
Why did we select this tool? Wappalyzer shows you the technologies used by other websites, allowing you to improve your own results in terms of traffic, engagement and even sales.
5. Owletter
It's also a very specialized tool that looks at one aspect of competitive research that almost no other tool covers: Owletter conducts email-based searches. It gives you detailed information about your competitors' current offers, their sales periods, how they present new products, and even the text used in the subject field to boost the open email rate.
This information is very revealing of what your audience wants to see and what it responds to.
Why did we select this tool? With Owletter, you can get detailed data about what's working well in your competitors' email campaigns and the strategies they're using right now.
See also other email marketing services for your WordPress blog
6. Moz
Moz has a powerful suite of competitive search tools that provide in-depth information on keyword usage, domain authority, positioning, and more. This analysis tool is one of the giants in this field.
Its auditing features give you a lot of data about what's happening on your website, both technically and strategically, as well as on your competitor's websites. This platform also offers a social media analysis, which provides an overview of what is happening.
This tool is very useful to browse the websites of your competitors and compare them to yours. This suite also allows you to access your competitors' backlink profiles and search for other websites (and other factors) that potentially contribute to or detract from the authority of their domains.
The domain authority score, developed by Moz, allows you to closely link all of this data and to show you clearly how it overlaps.
Why did we select this tool? Moz has a complete suite of tools that can provide you with data on the strategic and technical actions of your competitors. Its best feature: show you how your competitors' backlink profiles affect the authority of their domains.
7 Alexa
Alexa is an Amazon analytics program that has great search capabilities. This tool shows you in record time how the websites you target are positioned relative to the average in their sector.
It offers you a comparison of their traffic, their bounce rates, their links and their general positioning. This tool also suggests several tools covering audience overlap, so that you can even identify competitors whose existence you did not know existed and which channels brought in the most traffic.
Alexa also provides a considerable amount of information about keywords. This tool shows you which keywords drive traffic to competing websites, which is a source of new ideas for your content. This information is combined with audience and demographic data, probably the most advanced among the tools included in this article.
Explore the interests of your competitors' audience, the audience overlap you have with different competitors, and audience interactions with their websites.
Why did we select this tool? Alexa is a powerful tool as a whole, but its audience data is the best reason you have to opt for it. Its audience overlap feature is useful and its demographics are very detailed.
8. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a content-driven competitive research tool. It allows you to determine what really appeals to your audience in terms of blog posts, lead magnets, etc.
Using this tool, you can identify new competitors and see what they are doing as part of their Content marketing.
You can see the length of their publications, the type of channels they use, and you can quickly access content that delivers the best results in your industry. Because the content speaks volumes about the audience, its issues, and what attracts it to a website, this tool can not be more useful.
Why did we select this tool?
If you want to conduct a competitive, content-driven search, BuzzSumo is the tool for you.
Bonus: Some tips for conducting competitive research
These eight competitive analysis tools are all extremely useful; however, to get the most out of these tools, you need to know how to interpret the data collected and how to exploit them to your advantage.
To do this, you need to look at the indicators you see and understand what leads to these results. It's not enough to know that your competitor is getting more search traffic than you do, you also need to understand why by researching your keywords and strategies.
Here are some tips to optimize your competitive search to improve the performance of your own website and potentially outperform your competitors:
-
- Examine the traffic on their website and then look at factors such as their backlink profiles, their placement in the SERP and the keywords they bid on to determine what is behind their good performance.
Website traffic analysis is essential to get an overview of the actions of each company in the sector and then to be able to accurately evaluate their strategies and tactics.
-
- Use the best keywords from your competitors to your own advantage and outbid them in your PPC campaigns if you are not able to outperform your competitors.
-
- Analyze the backlink profiles of your competitors: The more diverse profiles can give you some ideas for new publishing websites to which you could submit articles as a guest. You could also expand your network of backlinks to create co-marketing partnerships.
Determine which websites refer to content in your area and find ways to partner with them.
Conclusion
In order to carry out your marketing work, it is crucial to gain solid knowledge about your competitors, and that is precisely what these competitive analysis tools will be useful for you. We have carefully selected each of these eight tools in terms of their value and the amount of data they provide brands that want to optimize their positioning on the internet.
The 8 best competitive search tools for the marketing pros
SEMrush traffic analysis
- Meets all the needs of your competitive analysis, ranging from traffic overview the performance of the main landing pages
- Optimal to compare performance
- Clear visualization of the competitive landscape
- For a complete competitive search, use other tools from the suite (positioning in SERPs, keywords, backlinks, ads and social networks)
Similar Web
- Detailed competitive analysis
- Information about audience segments
- Clear visualization of sales funnels
Sprout Social
- Social listening and analysis of social networks
- Reveal what people are saying about your competitors
- Highlight your competitors' strategies
- Weakness: focused only on social networks
Wappalyzer
- Indicates applications and technologies used by other websites
- Provides direct links to plugins on competing sites
- Performs only one task, but effectively and for free
Owletter
- Shine a light on your competitors' email campaigns
- Provides data on individual campaigns and rates of openness and clicks
- Helps to discover your competitors' strategies, their writing styles and their offers
- Performs only one task, but effectively
Moz
- Complete suite of competitive search tools
- Very many features ranging from keyword research to traffic analysis
- Shows the influence of your competitors' backlink profiles on the authority of their domains and their positioning
Alexa
- A lot of audience analysis data
- Identifying new competitors in your sector
- Solid information about website performance
BuzzSumo
- Competitive search based on content
- Estimation of the trends of the content presenting the best results
- Highlighting the strategies and content type of your competitors
