When it comes to gaining online visibility and generating leads, there's no need to reinvent the wheel and waste time and money figuring things out for yourself. Much of the work has already been done by your competition, especially if they have invested in digital marketing.
You can use the tools below to spy on your competition and see their most profitable keywords, how well optimized they are, valuable links coming into their sites, what kind of content they're distributing online, ad data, and a host of other insights that will give you the competitive edge.
Combine the insight that you gain from the tools below with the insight that you gained from completing the competition section of the Market Research & Avatar Planner. You already did that, right? If not, be sure you complete that before starting to use the list building methods.
Also see this Guide to SEO Competitor Analysis >>
And here's another good article on how to ethically spy on your competition using 3 of the tools mentioned below.
- Alexa
Gain deeper insight into your competitors’ performance. Alexa gives you a complete breakdown of your competitors’ activities, reporting:
The number of pages linked to their websites.
Average page loading times.
Search data and keyword insights.
Alexa also segments traffic into 4 channels: organic searches, social media, links, and direct traffic. This lets you see which channels are the most (and least) successful for each company.
The Audience Overlap tool lists your competitors and where you rank among them. This tool is very useful for new brands that haven’t identified their competitors yet.
- Ahrefs
Tools to grow your search traffic, research your competitors and monitor your niche. Ahrefs helps you learn why your competitors rank so high and what you need to do to outrank them.
You can even track competitors and measure their performance against your site. That way, you can learn from the competition and build a good SEO strategy of your own. - Google Keyword Planner
More than just a tool to research keywords for paid ads. Enter the URL of your competitor and learn their top keywords and new keyword ideas.
It will give you a monthly search volume for each keyword, so you’ll know what topics to cover so you can beat your competitors.
Pay attention to the bidding values for each keyword. If the values are high, then it could be difficult to rank for that keyword. Look for longer tail keywords with lower bid values.
If you want to dig deeper into Keyword Planner, then How to Use Google Keyword Planner has the details and some nice hacks. - iSpionage
Steal Your Competitors' Traffic & Uncover Their Conversion Strategy. You get access to seven years worth of PPC and SEO keyword data that covers the top three search engines—Google, Bing, and Yahoo—and includes 92,000,000 keywords, 108,000,000 ad copy variations, and 45,000,000 domains.
You’ll have full access to incredibly valuable competitor PPC intelligence data for your entire industry for only a few dollars per day. It also has a keyword tool for finding trendy keywords for your own SEO and PPC campaigns.
