6 Awesome Tools for Competitor Research

Posted July 20, 2020 by Lee

Competitor research is important, you need to know what space you are working in, is your product unique or are you in a crowded market? Here are some awesome tools that I highly recommend for keeping tabs on your competition!

1. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a well known backlinks and SEO analytics toolkit.

They are constantly improving all their algorithms to provide the freshest and most accurate backlink data for their customers.

Besides that, they are trying to track all emerging developments in the SEM and SEO world and make sure that these developments find their reflection in Ahrefs’ latest features.

Some of the best competitor research features Ahrefs has are:

• Content explorer
• Content gap analysis
• Link intersect tool
• Rank tracker
• Organic keywords

Another handy feature is the organic search tab, which will give you an estimate of a competitors organic search volume over time. This section will also show you how many keywords your competitor is ranking for, and over a changeable time period.

2. Similarweb

SimilarWeb is one of the most powerful devices you’ll find to evaluate competitor pages. It shows where much of the traffic coming from your rivals, as well as any related pages that they frequent.

Traffic is split into 4 channels, so that you can see how each source is doing. These are: paying, social, searching, and direct traffic.

3. Link Explorer (Moz)

Whilst Link Explorer is quite dated, it still has some amazing features to keep track of your competitors link building efforts. Below is a handful of Link Explorer’s top features in my opinion:

DA / PA Tracking

In the Overview section, link Explorer gives you a DA over time graph. The chart shows you how links will affect this metric and you can easily share this data with your customers and let them know about the effect of your efforts to reach out and create links.

Discovered links

You will see through URLs that no longer have ties were connecting to you. This gives you a chance to access certain pages.

Comparing links with the link comparison tool

Would you like to learn how your website or the website of your company is doing relative to your competitors? This feature allows you to compare backlink profiles and see metrics, such as the number of domains each site has to link.

4. BuzzSumo

For relevant topics for your brand and specific competitors, Buzzsumo allows you to look at the top-performing content. The tool examines the engagement of a piece of content on social sites as well as its total web-wide shares.

BuzzSumo is a widely used competitor research tool, some of their customers include: Glass Digital, BlueClaw, Distilled, TrueShopping and SeerInteractive.

5. Owler

This market research platform, uses community data to curate data and information from startups related to your niche. Again, you insert brands to create your own personalised dashboard of industry names to watch, another resource reserved for bigger brands.

6. Feedly

There is no shortage of aggregator news pages. Feedly helps you to configure the pages you’re following, enabling you to segment by trends in the general market, customers, competitors.

There’s a browser extension for easily attaching sites to your feed. A Pro account is available with additional features, but the free option will keep you up-to-date on material with no hassle.

---

So there you have it, a complete round-up of awesome tools to help you with your competitor research. Let us know how you get on by heading over to our Facebook page or send us a mention on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you.

Categories: SEO