Competition is everywhere, even in the digital realm. Ad placement, traffic, followers or sales – there’s no aspect of your business that you don’t have to compete with others. You can use your competitors’ efforts to your advantage through competitor analysis.

Competitor analysis is a wonderful way to know what your competitors are up to and what’s working in your industry. This will pave the way for your digital marketing strategy, helping you to optimise it without wasting resources, money or time on experiments!

With the right competitor analysis, you will be able to mine useful data quickly, efficiently and effectively. In this post, we take a look at the top free tools for competitor analysis.

Competitor analysis tools for web

When you want to keep track of the latest updates on what your competitors are up to, Google Alerts is an excellent option.

Simply log in to your Google account, head to Google Alerts and type in the names of your competitors that you want to track.

Every time your chosen competitors are mentioned on the web, you will receive an email from Google.

Competitor analysis tools for social media

If you want to know how popular your competitors are on social media, use tools like HootSuite, Sprout Social, Phlanx or Social Mention.

Social Media will provide detailed information such as mentioning frequency, reach, sentiments, etc., from across the different social platforms.
Sprout Social is a complete social media analytics tool that not only provides data about your performance but can compare yours with your competitors’.

Phlanx is an Instagram engagement tool that shows how active an account’s followers are. This is a useful tool to assess your competitors’ Instagram presence.

Competitor analysis tools for SEO & backlinks

SEO is a crucial digital strategy that can help improve your website’s rankings in the search engines. And backlinks are the backbone of SEO. If you are keen to add quality backlinks to your site, it helps to know where your competitors are getting their backlinks from.

SEMRush is an excellent SEO tool but its competitor analysis tool is miles ahead. Use it to find your competitors’ backlinks whilst monitoring any change in their rankings. Other backlink analysis tools including Linkody, CleverStat and LinkMiner.

Ahrefs is a fantastic SEO competitor analysis tool that allows you to check any website’s top organic keywords. You can also gather a rough estimate of the traffic a website receives for any given keyword.

Competitor analysis tools for content

Need some content ideas? Find what kind of content your competitors are creating and what content is working for them so you can identify any gaps that you can fill through your content marketing strategy.

The Content Analyser tool from BuzzSumo allows you to search by topic or URL to find top-performing content. For every search phrase or topic you enter, the tool displays the most popular articles including the number of shares or engagements on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Pinterest.

Similarweb is another fabulous tool for SEO and content. It allows you to dig deep into your competitors’ content and find the source of their traffic. You can also find out what topics a website’s visitors are searching for and what other websites they visit for the given search query.

Feedly is another excellent competitor analysis tool for content. This content aggregator oragnises content as it is published, allowing you to find hot topics your competitors are covering.

Insight Multimedia, your digital marketing partner.

Need help creating a solid digital marketing strategy for your business? Contact Insight Multimedia today. Our online marketing specialists will create a bespoke strategy to suit your business, goals and budget.

Credit: Bob Stokes