33 Best Competitor Analysis Tools for Winning at SEO in 2022

Let’s be frank: SEO is competitive. And that’s why you need competitor analysis tools – they allow you to see exactly what your competitors are doing to get the top positions in the search results.

Here are 33 tools to spy on your competitors and steal their strategies!

Why SEO Should Start With Competitor Analysis

There are two reasons why any SEO strategy should start with competitor analysis:

• SEO is inherently competitive, so you need to know what you’re up against
• Whatever your niche or industry, the hard work – such as finding what keywords bring the most targeted traffic – has already been done.

What Can You Discover with Competitor Analysis?

Here are some of the things that SEO competitor analysis will tell you:

• Who is winning in organic search within your niche or industry
• Who is winning in organic search within your niche or industry
• Which tactics are working best
• How difficult it will be to outperform your competitors
• Where the gaps are that you can take advantage of
• Find keywords with high search volume that no one in your niche is targeting

Keyword Strategy

The main focus of SEO competitor analysis is keywords.

You’ll see exactly what keywords your competitors are targeting, which keywords bring your competitors their most traffic, and which keywords bring them the highest ROI.

Link Building Opportunities

But SEO competitor analysis will also reveal link opportunities that you can take advantage of, the internal linking tactics that your competitors are using, and the backlink strategies that are working best for your competitors.

SEO competitor analysis tools don’t all do the same thing. Here are some of the specific metrics different competitor analysis tools provide:

Here are some of the main SEO competitor analysis tools:

• Identify which domains you are competing with in organic search
• Get a list of keywords that your competitors are targeting in organic search
• Monitor competitors’ search rankings: see the distribution of a competitor’s position on the first page of search results
• Estimate competitor’s traffic
• Monitor the distribution of traffic share within your niche by competitor domain
• Get detailed site metrics on your competitors’ monthly page views, monthly unique visits, time on site, and bounce rate
• Discover the demographics of competing domains
• Track competitors’ link growth
• See which pages on your competitor’s site are bringing in the most backlinks

33 Best Competitor Analysis Tools

These 33 tools don’t all do the same thing: some of them focus on your competitors’ keywords, others on your competitors’ backlinks, and others simply reveal your competitor’s traffic volume.

But they will all help you get an insight into the strategies your competitors are using. Emulate those strategies and there’s no reason why you can’t achieve the same success they have!

#1. SEMrush

Regarded by many as the best keyword research tool on the web, SEMrush does much more than keyword research.

It’s also a powerful SEO competitor analysis tool. Here are some of the things you can do with SEMrush:

• Find out where your rivals concentrate most of their marketing efforts
• Discover their websites’ traffic, audiences and lead generation sources
• Analyse their regional presence
• Get a bird’s-eye view of your competitors’ SEM strategies
• Dig into your competitors advertising strategies and tactics
• Evaluate their online performance
• Learn about your competitors’ most successful SEO practices
• See the domains you are competing with for the top positions in Google
• Identify competitors’ target keywords you’ve overlooked
• Conduct in-depth analysis of your competitors’ backlinks
• Uncover link-building opportunities by watching your rivals’ lost links
• Find and evaluate the websites linking to your competitors but not to you
• Compare your backlink profile against your rivals’
• Get a list of domains to target in your link-building campaigns

Plans & Pricing

• Pro: $119.95 p/month
• Guru: $229.95 p/month
• Business: $449.95 p/month

#2. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO and content analysis tool which you can use to analyse competitor keywords, both organic and PPC, backlinks, and traffic metrics. 

Discover which of your competitor’s pages are bringing in the most backlinks, social shares, and traffic. Ahrefs has a database of 192 billion pages, making it largest index of backlinks on the web.

Plans & Pricing

• Lite: $99 p/month
• Standard: $179 p/month
• Advanced: $399 p/month
• Agency: $999 p/month

#3. Majestic

Majestic is a link intelligence tool that has the “the planet’s largest Link Index database”. 

Majestic’s Compare Tool allows you to analyse your site against your competition by comparing your site with up to 10 different websites.

Discover which of your competitors has the highest Trust Flow, which has the most number of backlinks, which has the most governmental domains linking to them etc. You can also see which websites have been gaining the most number of links over a period of time.

Plans & Pricing

• Lite: $49.99 p/month
• Pro: $99.99 p/month
• API: $399.99 p/month

#4. Alexa

Alexa is a global ranking system based on traffic data but can also be used a competitor analysis tool. The Alexa rank allows you to see how your site performs relative to other sites.

But you can also use Alexa for competitor analysis:

• Find sites that share a similar audience and perform audience overlap analysis to find new demographics.
• Benchmark your performance against competitors
• Get website traffic statistics for your competitors, such as popularity, engagement, unique visitors, and other metrics
• Discover what marketing channels are working for competitors
• Uncover new SEO tactics by understanding what strategies are working for other sites.

Plans & Pricing

• Basic: $19.99 p/month
• Insight: $79 p/month
• Advanced: $149 p/month
• Agency: $299 p/month

#5. SpyFu

SpyFu is a suite of competitor analysis tools for organic keywords, AdWords and PPC.

Spy Fu allows you to search for any competitor and download their keywords. Helps to uncover your competitors’ PPC & SEO strategies.

View your competitor’s complete AdWords campaign history. Helps you keep track of every website in your SEO niche. Notice changes in rankings and content over time.

Plans & Pricing

• Basic: $39 p/month
• Professional: $79 p/month
• Team: $299 p/month

#6. Mangools SERP Checker

Mangools is primarily known for its keyword research tool. But in 2019 they added competitor research tools:

Just type in the domain of a competitor and you’ll see the keywords they rank for, together with all the key metrics, such as search volume, search trends, keyword difficulty, SERP analysis and more.

Plans & Pricing

• Basic:$29.90 p/month
• Premium: $39.90 p/month
• Agency: $79.90 p/month

#7. Ispionage

Ispionage is a competitive intelligence tool that does exactly what it says in the tag line: ‘Steal Your Competitors’ Traffic & Uncover Their Conversion Strategy’. Ispionage leans towards PPC but also includes SEO metrics.

Here are some of the competitor insights it will give you:

• Find profitable keywords faster
• Get competitor SEO keyword lists
• Find out how much your competitors are spending per month on AdWords
• Identify your competitors’’ most profitable keywords
• Find out which ads get the most traffic
• Uncover your top competitors in Google, Yahoo, and Bing

Plans & Pricing

• Starter: $59 p/month
• Professional: $99 p/month
• Advanced: $299 p/month
• Enterprise: Custom (contact them)

#8. DataForSEO

DataForSEO is another of the top competitor analysis tools. It helps you find out more about the online presence of rival websites. Get the following metrics for competitor’s websites:

• Estimated traffic analysis by countries
• Traffic and its sources
• Bounce rate
• Average time on site
• Top keywords

DataForSEO is designed primarily for SEO companies.

Plans & Pricing

Pay-as-you-go pricing:

• $50-$1000 (get $50 for $50) = x 1
• $ 1,000-2,500 (get $1,250 for $1,000) = x 1.25
• $ 2,500-5,000 (get $3,750 for $2,500) = x 1.5
• $ 5,000-10,000 (get $8,750 for $5,000) = x 1.75
• $ 10,000+ (get $20,000 for $10,000) = x 2

#9. Rank Signals

Rank Signals is a backlink checker. It helps you find and identify your competitors’ best links as the basis for implementing a strategic link building strategy.

Plans & Pricing

Rank Signals is 100% free – no paid plans.

#10. SE Ranking

SE Ranking is cloud based SEO software that focuses on keyword position tracking. 

It allows you to identify your competitors’ keywords and ads for paid and organic search. Provides real-time positions of your keywords and your competitors’ keywords in major search engines.

Plans & Pricing

• Optimum: $31 p/month
• Plus: $71 p/month
• Enterprise: $151 p/month

SUGGESTED READING

One Hour Professor: 10+ Best Rank Tracking Software for SEO in 2021 (In-Depth Review)

#11. Monitor Backlinks

Monitor Backlinks is a competitive analysis backlink tool that lets you monitor your own backlinks as well as identify where your competitors are getting their best backlinks from. It now includes a keyword rank tracker tool that stores and tracks all your keywords in one place.

This is one of my favourite competitor analysis tools.

Plans & Pricing

• Start: $25.00
• Plus: $47.40
• Professional: $89.91

#12. Moz Link Explorer

Moz Link Explorer is a tool from Moz that allows you to monitor backlinks, page and domain authority, anchor text, and linking domains for both your website and your competitors.

Plans & Pricing

• Free Trial: $0 p/month (10 link queries and 50 rows of data per query every month)
• Standard: $99 p/month
• Medium: $149 p/month
• Large: $249 p/month
• Premium: $599 p/month

#13. Link Research Tools

Link Research Tools provides tools for Link Audit and Google Recovery, Link Building, Backlink Analysis, and Competitor Analysis.

LRT’s competitor analysis metrics allow you to learn from and outperform your competition by leveraging insights around their link behaviour, their mistakes and their successes.

Here are some of the tactics available to you with Link Research Tools:

• Understand link ratios and risk levels for every niche.
• Find strong links which are used by competitors
• Evaluate competitors’ websites and links and learn how to outperform them
• Find out who is ranking well for the keywords in any specific sector and determine new SEO opportunities
• View comprehensive backlink profiles for competitive sites
• Find the strongest pages of any website and understand why they are performing so well

Plans & Pricing

• LRT Superhero Small Trial: €17 for 7 days, then €499
• Superhero Small: €499 p/month
• Superhero Standard: €799 p/month
• Superhero Plus: €1,999 p/month
• Superhero Ultra: €2,999 p/month

#14. BrightEdge

BrightEdge is aimed is an enterprise level SEO tool that handles comprehensive keyword management. The tool allows you to benchmark your competition and helps you to understand how to perform better against your competition at the keyword level.

You can measure and track share of voice and identify key topics that you are not ranking on but should create content for.

Plans & Pricing

Contact BrightEdge

#15. Conductor

Conductor is an enterprise content marketing platform but includes SEO competitive analysis.

Conductor’s Domain Explorer gives you a high level look at how all the content on your domain is performing compared to your competitors. Conductor uses the following approach to competitor analysis:

• Identify known and unknown competitors
• Compare your rankings and content with competitors
• Discover content opportunities where you can outrank them
• Create content, or optimize existing content, based on your discoveries.

Plans & Pricing

Contact Conductor

#16. SERPSTAT

Serpstat describes itself as an all-in-one SEO platform: a growth hacking tool for SEO, PPC, and content marketing. It allows you to track your positions in the SERPS, conduct backlink analysis, do keyword research, and perform a site audit. One of the most affordable competitor analysis tools.

Plans & Pricing

• Lite: $69
• Standard: $149
• Advanced: $299
• Enterprise: 499

#17. Searchmetrics

Searchmetrics gives you detailed reports on how your competitors rank for certain keywords and reveal their search strategy.

Searchmetrics enables you to make quick improvements and get a competitive advantage. Compare your website with your competitors, find out their strengths and weaknesses to optimize your online strategy.

Plans & Pricing

$89 p/month

#18. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb allows you to identify where your competitor’s traffic comes from and helps you understand your market, your competitors, and your customers.

SimilarWeb reveals your competition’s analytics & online strategy. Similar Web processes over 5 billion events a day and analyses them using machine learning algorithms.

Plans & Pricing

• Free: $0 p/month
• Custom: Contact SimilarWeb

#19. Siteliner

Siteliner (a product of Copyscape) is not primarily a competitor analysis tool – it is designed to analyse your own site and search for broken links, duplicate content and other factors that might be negatively affecting your SEO.

However, Siteliner will also provide you with a list of broken links on your competitors’ websites. And this allows you to perform broken link building, one of the most effective link building strategies ever invented.

For a complete guide to broken link building, see this broken link building guide by Brian Dean.

Plans & Pricing

• Siteliner Free: $0 p/month
• Siteliner Premium: $ (upon request)

#20. SEO Rambler

SEO Rambler is a tool for comparing your site against your top 10 competitors.

This tools tells you how optimized a page from your site is for a particular keyword. It also tells you how your SEO optimization compares to that of the top 10 from your niche. Here are some of the metrics that Rambler analyses:

• Readability ease
• Word count
• Images on the page
• External links
• Semantic relevance
• Page Authority and Domain Authority
• Google Pagespeed Insights score

The SEO Rambler will show you where you need to optimize more and where you have over-optimized.

Plans & Pricing

free to use

#21. Raven Tools

Raven Tools is a suite of search engine optimization tools for link building and SEO research and reporting. It’s designed primarily for SEO agencies rather than end users.

Raven uses data from Majestic, Moz, Google AdWords and OpenCalais to provide keyword and competitor intelligence and insights. These competitor analysis tools help you identify the best strategy to outrank your competitors in the SERPs.

Plans & Pricing

• Small Biz: $39 p/month
• Start: $79 p/month
• Grow: $139 p/month
• Thrive: $249 p/month
• Lead: $399 p/month

#22. Rank Ranger

Rank Ranger is a dedicated competition analysis tool. It’s designed to show how your site compares against your top competitors.

You’ll be able to compare your site with your competitors’ sites in terms of metrics such as:

• Share of visibility
• Number of keywords in the top 20 Google results
• Share of total search volume

Here are some of the competitor analysis tools provided by Rank Ranger:

• Competitors who rank in the top 20 Google results for your keywords.
• Graphs show you which websites held the top 20 positions on Google for each of your keywords over the past 30 days
• Insights into your competitors’ attempts to increase their CTR.
• See all the changes they made to their page titles and meta descriptions over the past 30 days
• Competitor Rank Comparison report shows your website’s rank and that of your competitors’ side by side for all of your keywords
• Website Rank Distribution report shows you how your and competitors’ keyword rankings are distributed across the various positions on the SERPs

Plans & Pricing

• Lite: $79 p/month
• Standard: $149 p/month
• Pro: talk with Sales
• Premium: talk with Sales

#23. SERPWoo

SERPWoo is a tool that tracks, monitors, and analyses your rankings in the SERPs. It allows you to quickly spot new competitors, look up their stats and get an idea of what they are doing to get to the top.

SERPWoo allows you to quickly glance at all your niches/keywords, get intelligent alerts on what’s moving, and be one step ahead of your competition. You can opt to get notifications as soon as a competitor increases one of their metrics significantly (e.g. when a website that was ranking #20 jumps to #7 or when a competitor’s backlinks increase by more than 10%).

In a nutshell, the purpose of SERPWoo’s various competitor analysis tools is to understand what your competitors are doing so that you can get ahead of them in the search results.

Plans & Pricing

• Bronze: $49.95
• Silver: $99.95
• Gold: $199.95
• Platinum: $299.95

#24. SEOBOOK

SEOBOOK provides a range of metrics on your competitors that allows you to understand their SEO strategy and emulate it and find gaps that your competitors have overlooked.

The metrics provided by SEOBOOK allow you to:

• Discover which keywords are most valuable in your niche
• Reveal strengths and weaknesses in your competitors’ SEO strategies
• look up sites which have a similar ranking footprint as an existing competitor to uncover new areas & opportunities
• compare organic search results versus paid search ads

SEOBOOK’s metrics include:

• granular data across the global Bing & Google databases
• search volume & ad bid price estimates by keyword for over 120,000,000 words
• keyword data by site or by page across 74,000,000 domain names

Plans & Pricing

• Free: $0 p/month
• Paid: $? (currently closed to new members)

#25. Cocolyze

Cocolyze is an SEO tool that keeps an eye on your Google ranking. It sends you a weekly update on he SEO activity of your pages. The dashboard allows you see at a glance key metrics for your various campaigns, such as average rank position and number of tracked keywords. If you suddenly lose a position, this tool tells you exactly what happened and how to regain it. You can also follow the Google ranking of your competitors and find out if they’re ranking for the same keywords as you.

Plans & Pricing

• Essential: $27.53 p/month (14 day free trial)
• Pro: $77.54 p/month
• Enterprise: Chat with them

#26. Pi Datametrics

Pi Datametrics is a search intelligence platform that allows you to measure the impact of your brand, product lines and your performance against competitors for any online campaign. The software helps you match your message and the timing of campaigns to consumer needs.

Plans & Pricing

• Bespoke plans only

#27. Whatrunswhere

WhatRunsWhere is a competitive intelligence service for online media buying. See where your competitors are advertising, what their ads look like, and how effective those adverts are. Get access to a complete and accurate picture of digital advertising in your niche. Use the ad intelligence platform to discover winning strategies, learn which ads perform best and build more profitable campaigns.

Plans & Pricing

• Basic: $299 p/month
• Full Coverage: $399 p/month
• Enterprise: contact them

#28. BuiltWith

BuiltWith is a competitive analysis and business intelligence tool that gives you lead generation, sales, business intelligence, and eCommerce data about competing websites. BuiltWith allows you to identify market segments that your brand may be missing out on.

Plans & Pricing

• Basic: $295 p/month
• Pro: $495 p/month
• Team: $995 p/month

#29. Owletter

Owletter captures, stores and analyzes your competitors’ emails. It automatically captures all emails sent from a website to its mailing list. It then takes a screenshot of the email, stores it and analyses it, and alerts you about the email if it’s important to you.

You can use this tool to discover:

• your competitors’ mailing frequency and schedule
• trending topics
• overlooked opportunities
• and more

Plans & Pricing

• Starter: $19 p/month
• Pro: $39 p/month
• Unlimited: $79 p/month

#30. Website Grader

Website Grader is an online marketing and SEO tool that grades you and your competitors on the basis of how effective the website is in terms of social media activity, blogging engagement, SEO performance, and lead generation.

What makes this tool appealing is the overall score it assigns to all websites – it allows you to quickly compare your site’s performance with your competitors and monitor fluctuations in performance.

Plans & Pricing

• Free to use: $0 p/month

#31. Netpeak Checker

Netpeak Checker is a desktop tool for mass analysis and comparison of websites on a wide range of different parameters. It scapes SERP results and aggregates data from top SEO services and then compares websites in bulk.

This is an ideal tool for marketers who want to scope out the overall competition within a niche.

Plans & Pricing

• Freemium: $0 p/month
• Standard: $15.20 p/month
• Pro: $31.20 p/month
• Premium: $119.20 p/month

#32. RankActive

Use RankActive’s ‘Competitors Inspector’ to understand who your competitors are, and compare your website against theirs. 

This tool provides valuable insights into your rivals’ traffic, keywords, visibility, and rankings.

With RankActive you can conduct deep research about your competitor’s SEO tactics and capitalize on their techniques.

Plans & Pricing

• Minimal: $99.99 p/month
• Optimal: $149.99 p/month
• Ultimate: $229.99 p/month
• Flexible: $144.95 p/month

#33. Ranktracker

Before you take on your competitors in an SEO battle, find out if you’ve got a chance of winning.

Ranktracker lets you see what keywords other companies are ranking for, and whether it’s worth trying to beat them. Use this information to plan your SEO strategy and find out where the best opportunities are.

Plans & Pricing

• Starter: $7.20 p/month
• Double Data: $23.60 p/month
• Quad Data: $43.60 p/month
• Hex Data: $83.60 p/month

Conclusion

Competitor analysis tools are essential if you want to get ahead in the highly competitive SEO field.

By its nature SEO is competitive. So, it’s only natural that the starting point in designing an effective SEO strategy is competitor analysis.

SEO competitor analysis tools  show you where your website stands within the SEO landscape of your niche.

Competitor analysis tools show you:

• Which organic keywords are bringing your competitors most of their traffic
• Which websites are providing your competitors with their most high-quality backlinks
• Which kinds of content are giving your competitors the most social shares

Your competitors’ SEO strategies are the result of years of trial and error and thousands of dollars. With SEO competitor analysis you save yourself time and money and give yourself a huge head start.

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• How To Do Competitor Keyword Research in SEMrush