10 Best Competitor Research Tools

— December 2, 2016

Continuous improvement plays an important role in your SEO success. The key to is to know the competitors’ merits and demerits, including their marketing strategies, sales, website performance and analytics in whole. If you don’t know how your competitors operate, you can’t make important decisions that will help you retain current customers and attract new clients.


Today there is no shortage of competitor research tools on the market, and each one can offer its insights and features relevant to a particular niche. We’ve gathered a list of tools that help you define intelligence you need in your competitive analyses and research.


#1. SE Ranking – Discover your competitors keywords and ads for paid and organic search


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SE Ranking is definitely one of my favorite competitor research tools that let you know which keywords the competitors are using in organic and paid search. You will get a full list of all competitors for a certain search query, all historical advertising per certain query, similar meaning keywords and expand your research. The best part is that all data is available in a visual format. The tool also allows you monitor competitors backlinks and website rankings to improve your offsite optimization campaign.


#2. Mention – a tool for social media monitoring


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Mention is a very easy-to-use tool that allows you monitor competitors’ activities in a real-time mode. You can view how many times and how often they are mentioned and get all live updates in automated reports. You just need to enter a keyword or a brand in a certain field, and the tool will show you what’s being said about the search term.


#3. Buzzsumo – a monitoring tool for competitors’ content and keywords


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Buzzsumo is a powerful tool that enables you to analyze the best performing content of your competitors on the number of social shared. The tool estimates the overall performance of competitors’ keywords and content and checks out how many mentions your competitors’ have gotten. Buzzsumo offers the option to search for key influencer by keyword and provides extra data on who shared content from other social networks.


#4. Topsy – a monitoring tool for social media


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Topsy is an awesome social media monitoring tool for Twitter. It shows all competitors’ tweets with certain keywords and provides all information about them with real-time data and search filters. You can view a list of influential tweets and people who tweet your rivals.


#5. Feedly – a monitoring tool for RSS feeds


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Feedly is a good tool to monitor competitors’ RSS feeds. It is a free tool and helps you subscribe your rivals’ RSS feeds. You can easily view all new content published on competitors’ websites. The tool allows you to find or improve your link building possibilities and organize your content better.


#6. FanPage Karma – a good tool for social media monitoring


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Fan Page Karma allows you to analyze social media profiles of your projects and your competitors with reports, analyses and KPIs. It is a good way to generate ideas from your rivals and evaluate post topics, best posting time, engagement, etc. Using the tool you can find new link building strategies to increase your social reach and online success.


#7. SpyOnWeb – a monitoring tool for internet competitive intelligence


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SpyOnWeb is another competitor research tool that helps you spy on traffic sources, PageRank, Alexa rank, domains under the same IP, DNS servers of your competitors. It’s a free tool and all data gathered from publicly available resources.


#8. iSpionage – a monitoring tool for PPC and SEO


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iSpionage is a powerful competitive intelligence tool that enables you to find out competitors’ organic and paid keyword in Google, Bing and Yahoo, access to useful competitor PPC intelligence data and provides a full list of AdWords competitor keywords with KEI and profitable keywords with the highest search volume.


#9. Marketing Grader – a monitoring tool for inbound marketing


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Marketing grader is a free HubSpot tool that gives an overall information how your competitors are performing on social media, SEO, blogging, lead generation and mobile optimization. The tool gathers all data points and calculates a total score of each website. The tool also allows you find a complete information about backlinks, meta descriptions, indexed pages, image and title tags, etc. It is easy to use, just enter your URL and email, and you will get a full analysis on your competitors.


#10. Google Alerts – a tool for monitoring social mentions


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Google Alerts is a good free alternative to Mention. It is very simple to use, just add a target keyword and you will get daily reports on your email. The tool helps you spy on your competitors mentioned online whether it’s a simple mention or a link.


The Bottom Line


Continuous development of your online business is all about learning and staying ahead of the curve. All 10 tools I mention will give you a complete kit to find out what works and possible mistakes to avoid when running your marketing projects.


All these tools are useful when it comes to collecting data about competitors. You will instantly get insights what works and what doesn’t work for you.


What are your favorite tools to spy on your rivals? Have you ever used any of above-mentioned tools? Let us know your thoughts and your story in the comments below.

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Author: Irina Weber


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