Do you know what your market positioning is with respect to your competitors? A competitive analysis is a starting point for creating marketing strategies.
In this article, we’ll give you the best competitor analysis tools you need to get the data and analyze it.
What’s a Competitor Analysis?
Finding competitors in your business and learning about their various marketing strategies is the process of conducting a competitor analysis.
You can compare your data to those of your competitors to determine your company’s advantages and disadvantages.
SWOT Analysis Method
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
And the SWOT Analysis method is used for identifying and analyzing the internal strengths and weaknesses, and the external opportunities and threats of your business.
Creativisocial Tip: Once you’ve filled in this, try to answer, “How can you make your competitor’s weaknesses your strengths?”
How to gather the competitor’s data and from where
We live in the information age, and this can lead us to become paralyzed by saturation, in addition to questioning what information is truthful.
To do this, we must know in advance what information we are looking for and for what purpose. After all, complexity is the enemy of action.
1. Think of the products and/or services you sell.
Who sell them too? These are your competitors. Make a list.
For instance, if you sell productivity agendas. Your competitor will be those who sell not any kind of agendas, but the ones which are purposely made for making you more productive.
2. Use the Swot Analysis Method
Use this method to understand what type of data you should prioritize.
If your competitor is running a successful blog, you might consider SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or even SEM Website Positioning as relevant information to gather.
3. Choose the best competitor analysis tools
Choose the tools that will allow you to gather the information you’re looking for.
We are talking about the tools that will help you gather and analyze the data, and that we’ve compiled a list, so you can make a use of them, as needed.
Related content: How to conduct a social media audit in less than 30 minutes
37 Best Competitor Analysis Tools
When it comes to competitor research and analysis, here are the best tools:
1. Mentionlytics
It’s a web and social media monitoring tool.
2. SEMrush
Semrush is a software for SEO/SEM professionals that allows you to analyze and compare your data with that of your competitors.
3. Ahrefs
One powerful and complete SEO tool on the market that you can use to analyze in depth any web page.
4. SpyFu
Spyfu is a tool that exposes the search marketing secret formula of your most successful competitors.
5. Inlinks
A tool for semantic search optimization.
6. MarketMuse
A tool to do deep competitive research.
7. Similarweb
It’s a website analytics & competitive traffic intelligence platform where you can compare website traffic and performance, analyze strategies while growing your market.
8. Followerwonk
Analyze and compare Twitter users.
9. VisualPing
It’s a website checker, website change monitoring and website change detection tool.
10. Distill.io
A tool to track website updates.
11. BuiltWith
A platform to get advanced technology market share information and country based analytics for all web technologies.
12. Buzzsumo
A tool to track mentions on your industry.
13. Alexa
Alexa can help you discover the world ranking of webs.
14. Ubersuggest
It helps you explore the keywords that your top competitors rank for.
15. QuickSprout
A tool that offers, in just a few minutes, a technical analysis of your website and a comparison of your competitors.
16. Answer the public
AnswerThePublic is an online tool that helps you find keywords and topics users are asking around the web.
17. Screaming frog
It’s a fast and advanced SEO site audit tool.
18. Website grader
Website grader is a free tool, developed by HubSpot and powered by Google Lighthouse, that will provide you with a customized report of your website or competitors.
19. Turbo ad finder
A free Facebook Ad spy that allows you to collect, save & hunt trending ads automatically from your facebook news feed.
20. Brand24
A social listening tool to track all public sources, including social, news, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts, reviews, etc.
21. SparkToro
For audience research, SparkToro is a tool that will help you discover the websites your customers visit, social accounts they follow, hashtags they use, etc.
22. PipeCandy
You can use this market intelligence platform to build lead lists, and research companies.
23. Owler
They define themselves as a service that provides higher precision and does a much better job than Google alerts. You go find out.
24. WhatRuns
Discover what runs a website with a free browser extension. Identify technologies used on any website.
25. Apollo.io
With its sales intelligence and engagement platform, you can search, engage and convert over 250 million contacts at over 60 million companies.
26. Lusha
It gives you access to the most accurate and up-to-date B2B contact and company data and ensure your system’s data is always current and fresh.
27. Metricool
A single tool for all the tasks of any social network and analyze your competition.
28. Fanpage karma
A complete solution that analyzes an unlimited number of profiles.
29. Socialmention
SocialMention is a web platform for search and analysis of all content aggregated by users on the Internet.
30. Google Alerts
Content monitoring service offered by Google’s search engine, which automatically notifies the user when new content is added to the search engine.
31. Wayback Machine
It’s an archive where you can explore more than 788 billion web pages saved over time.
32. Majestic
They consider themselves as The Planet’s Largest Link Index Database.
33. Adbeat
A tool to spy on your competitor’s ad strategies.
34. Webceo
It’s an all-in-one SEO platform with effective online SEO tools for digital marketing.
35. Thesearchmonitor
It helps you monitor SEM, SEO, PLA, Shopping, & Offer Content in one platform.
36. Mention
A tool to easily monitor sources across the web daily, including press articles, review sites, forums, and blogs.
37. Talkwalker
Consumer intelligence, social media monitoring and analysis tool.
Conclusion
There are many tools to collect data from your competitors and analyze it.
One way we can’t skip over is that of the mystery shopper. As a Michelin inspector, who anonymously inspects restaurants and hotels for the Michelin guides, you can also become your competitor’s client. And while gathering data, have fun!