Top 10 Competitor Analysis Tools [With Simple Tutorials On How to Use Them]

Are you looking for QUICK ways to make your blog profitable? Do you know there’s ONE little technique used widely by most successful marketers to quickly build million dollar blogs?

That one nifty way to rapidly grow a profitable blog is called “competitor analysis”.

If you want to build a successful blog, doing competitor analysis is a must.

Before entering into any niche, analyzing the competition helps you with three things.

• You can better understand about your target audience: Obviously, without focusing on your target audience needs and wants, you can never build a better blog that makes profits online.
• You can find out how many links to build to rank higher: Backlinks help you rank higher and faster in search results. The more number of quality backlinks you have the better search results you get even for highly competitive keyword phrases.
• You can easily find out what keywords to target: Keyword research is the key to build a high traffic blog. Without targeting the right keywords, you can’t increase both your search engine traffic and website sales. It’s as simple as that.

After all, there’s no big mistake other than entering into a highly competitive niche, spending most of your time on creating content and getting no result! That sucks, right?

To avoid that blogging burnout, you must do competitor analysis.

What is competitor analysis?

First things first. What is competitor analysis?

Competitor analysis is evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the big players (blogs and brands) in an industry. It gives you a better idea on the pros and cons of any niche.

It doesn’t matter what niche you are going to dive in, doing a proper competitor analysis will help you better understand about your market. In short, competitor analysis gives you a birds eye view about your target market.

Why it’s important?

Doing a full competitor analysis helps you better understand about your competition. It tells you how big or small your market is before entering into a niche. It also gives you where to focus on to get bigger and faster results.

How to do competitive analysis?

Now, if you are wondering how to do a detailed competitive analysis to better understand about your audience, keywords to target, products to promote etc., let me help you with this post.

There are so many competitor SEO tools out there which help you fully analyze the competition without much struggle. If you are looking for easy and fast ways to do competitive analysis, I’ve compiled a list of 10 of the best competitor analysis tools in this post.

A caveat: This is a HUGE post with around 2,000 words and I made sure to include ONLY the best competitor research tools to help you out. I also made sure to include simple tutorials on how to use each one of those competitor SEO softwares.

So are you ready to find out the top 10 competitor’s analysis tools to try in 2024 and beyond? Let’s get started.

10 Competitor Analysis Tools You Must Try

1. Semrush

Semrush has been one of my most favorite SEO tools for doing competitor analysis. It’s one of the finest tools not only to analyse the competition but also for increasing your overall website search traffic.

Quick Note: Read my recent case study on how I used Semrush to bring 5,000+ search visitors to my blog within 30 days.

Here’s how to use Semrush for doing a full competitor analysis within minutes.

Step 1: Log in to Semrush dashboard and enter the domain of any of your competitor.

Step 2: Semrush will now give you the FULL details of the domain you entered which includes the organic search, backlinks count, top keywords that are sending that domain most traffic, organic positions, main competitors, number of indexed pages and a whole lot of information.

Step 3: Once you figure out how much competition you have by looking at all the necessary things like main organic competitors, number of backlinks you need to build to rank higher, top organic keywords along with the search volume, you can easily find out whether or not to jump into a particular niche.

Step 4: Finding the top performing keywords that are helping your competitors to increase their overall search traffic. Have a look at the following screenshot to find all the top keywords that are driving most of the traffic to Problogger.net in search results.

Now, all you need to do with that keyword list is to whether or not to decide to start jumping into the niche you want. Make no mistake, keyword research is the only way to increase your overall website traffic. Without targeting the right keywords with less competition, it’s impossible to build a massive blog that gets both traffic and sales.

You can know about important features of Semrush tool from my Semrush review here and Click This Link to Try Semrush for free for the next 14 days.

Browse More:

• Semrush Coupon Code 2024 + FREE eBook!
• Best Semrush Alternatives for 2024

2. SE Ranking

It’s a handy tool to spy on your competitors site by getting information on their ranking on target regions and search engines. With this tool, you will be able to discover the websites that belong to the same person.

It also provides keywords, competitor SEO/PPC research, backlinks, etc.

Pricing: Personal plan ($7:00/month), Optimum ($39/month), Plus ($89/month) and Enterprise ($189/month).

How Best to Use this Tool

• Get the ranking information of your competitors on target regions
• Discover the website that belongs to the same person (your competitors).

Read: SE Ranking Review 2024: Is It A Game-Changing SEO Tool?

3. SpyFu

SpyFu is the #1 tool to find and download all your competitor’s most profitable keywords and ads for both paid and organic search. You can search and find any domain that gets huge traffic, you can also find what are the keywords that are driving them the most traffic. Every keyword, every organic rank is shown up using this tool.

Here’s the simple tutorial on how to analyse your competitors with SpyFu.

Step 1: Enter any domain of your competitor’s.

Step 2: It will now show you the full details of the domain you enter.

In this example, I’m using QuickSprout and when I enter that domain, SpyFu is showing me the below information.

See the above screenshot? It shows me all the information like organic keywords, keywords that are just made to first page, number of clicks and paid keywords (if there are any). With that information, you can easily analyze how hard your targeted niche is.

Step 3: On the left hand side, it will also show you so much information like competition, best performing keywords, links etc.

Here’s the top performing keywords of QuickSprout.

You can now use Long Tail Pro or Semrush to see the competition of the keywords listed above. That gives you a clear idea on whether or not to pick a niche.

Browse More:

• SpyFu Review: Is It the #1 Competitor Analysis Tool?
• SpyFu vs Semrush: Which is Better for Competitor Research?
• SpyFu Competitors: Best SpyFu Alternative Tools for 2024

4. Long Tail Pro

Long Tail Pro is another incredible tool mainly used for finding low competitive long tail keywords. It’s one of the widely used keyword research tools and also used by the marketing professionals like Pat Flynn, Marcus Sheridan etc.

Most people don’t know that Long Tail Pro can also be used for doing competitor analysis. If you are wondering how to do it with Long Tail Pro tool, follow the simple tutorial given below.

Step 1: Enter any name to create a project (you need to download and install the tool first).

Quick Tip: Go through this post to find out how to easily perform keyword research with Long Tail Pro keyword research tool.

Step 2: Now after entering any keyword of your choice, Long Tail Pro will fetch you a lot of relevant long tail keywords along with the monthly search volume. I highly recommended you to pick keywords that have monthly searches below 1000 to 2000 to get better and faster results.

Step 3: Now when you click on any of the keyword suggestion given by Long Tail Pro, it will show you all the necessary information that is enough to analyze your competition. In the below example, I’m taking the keyword “ipad mini with retina display” and when I click on it, Long Tail Pro shows me all the required information to find out the keyword competition in search results.

With the above details, you can decide whether or not to jump into any niche by knowing the competition and monthly search volume of certain keywords.

5. Google Keyword Planner

With Google keyword Planner, you can easily generate keywords for your site. The tool also helps you find competitor keyword data (organic and paid) and also helps you monitor your own website and your competitor’s website.

The tool does not completely focus on competitor’s analysis. The price is free, though you have to sign up for an Adwords account.

Price: Free when you have a free Google account.

How Best to Use this Tool

• Monitor both the paid and organic traffic of your competitors
• Monitor your own website and see what keywords you can rank for.

Read: Best Google Keyword Planner Alternatives for 2024

6. Google Alerts

With this tool, it is easy to track your competitor. You get alerted when he publishes a new blog post and the keywords he’s using or when he is mentioned online. What you will get include your competitor’s backlinks, keyword mentions, and social mentions.

Price: Free

How to use this Tool

• Monitor competitors keyword mentions
• Get competitors backlinks
• Track competitors social media mentions

7. Monitor Backlinks

This tool, though relatively new in the business, allows you to easily spy on your competitors site and use the knowledge you acquire to improve yours. With it, you can follow the backlinks of different competitors and have them sent to your mailbox.

The tool analyses the link based on the grading of the domain (lower or higher ranks), “do follow” or “no follow” links. It assists you in your new link-building opportunities. You get notification when your competitor gains or loses backlinks.

Pricing: From $19/month (for 2 accounts), $49.99/month (for 5 accounts) to $99.99 (for 10 accounts). If your need is more than 10 websites, you have to discuss the management.

How Best to Use This Tool

• Check the highest and lowest domains of the links of competitors
• Find out their nofollow vs. dofollow links
• Compare your results with competitors
• Email yourself your competitor backlinks
• Discover more link building opportunities

8. Similar Web

Spying on your competitor’s site is made easy with the Similar Web tool. Just type in the URL of any website and you will be provided with country rank, global ranks, and category rank, including a graph indicating the number of weekly visitors in the previous 6 months. You can add a competitor or allow the system to suggest to you the competitors to watch.

Pricing: Basic plan ($99/month), Advanced plan ($599/month), and the Enterprise plan ($2,999/month).

How Best to Use This Tool

• Get global, country, and category rank for any website
• Get traffic insights of any website
• Get suggestions of competitors you may want to watch
• View the data in graphic format

Read: Semrush vs Similarweb Comparison: Which Tool is Better?

9. Ahrefs

This tool shows you the IPs, top pages, and the external links to your competitors’ site. It also helps you in tracking your own keywords, backlinks, and brand mentions. It shows you the keywords your competitors are ranking for, and also sends you a mail when you or your competitors gain or lose backlinks.

Pricing: Lite ($82/month), Standard ($149/month), Advanced ($332/month) and Agency ($832/month).

How Best to Use This Tool

• Track your competitors keywords and backlinks profile
• Find IPs of competitors.

Read: Best Ahrefs Alternatives to Use in 2024
Read: Semrush vs Ahrefs: Which is The Better SEO Tool?

10. MajesticSEO

This is the last but not the least tool you can use to spy on your competitor’s site. Majestic SEO makes it possible for you to download your competitor’s site’s link profile. With the tool, you have an access to the hundreds or thousands of links on your competitors’ site.

The information you get gives you an insight into what is giving your rival an upper hand in his campaigns.

Pricing: Silver plan ($49/month), Gold plan ($149.99/month), and the Platinum plan ($399.99/month).

How Best to Use This Tool

• Get the trust and citation flow of any website
• Download the link profile of competitors website.

So there you go, those are the top 10 tools to analyse traffic of your competitor websites. You can try to better understand about your competitors, their keywords and traffic sources using these tools.

Note: I’ll be updating the page with the latest and more useful SEO analysis tools in the future. So make sure to bookmark the page if you want to make the most out of it.

Browse more Blogging Tools:

• Top Headline Analyzer Tools to Create Great Headlines
• Top Blog Name Generators to Find Great Domain Names
• Top Blogging Tools You Should be Using in 2024
• Top Image Editing Tools That are Free for Bloggers

Final Thoughts

Whether you are already blogging for a while or thinking to launch a new blog, you need to evaluate your competition. Competitor analysis helps you not only to increase your chances of getting more traffic but also sales.

Tools mentioned in this page are absolutely incredible. Even a beginner who never analyzed their competition can find those tools easy to use.

As I said earlier in the article, it’s crucial to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors if you want to get an edge over them. Without analysing them, you will struggle a lot to take your blog to the next level.

So what are you waiting for? If you are using any one of the tools mentioned here, do let me know your thoughts about them. Also mention your favorite tools to analyse your competitor websites in the comment section below.