Ever wondered how successful businesses always seem to be one step ahead of the competition? It's not just luck or intuition; it's the power of competitor analysis tools.
Spying on the competition isn’t a new idea. But improvements in competitor analysis software have simplified the process. Get valuable competitive intelligence insights into who your competitors are, what they’re doing well, and where you have an edge so you can tailor your approach to success.
Harnessing the power of these tools can give you a leg up in today’s competitive business environment. Here’s more on what tools for competitor analysis do, why you need them, and the best ones to add to your surveillance strategy.
Table of Contents
What Is a Competitor Analysis Tool?
What Are the Core Functionalities of Competitor Analysis Software?
Why You Need Competitor Analysis Tools
What Are the Best Competitor Analysis Tools on the Market?
What Is a Competitor Analysis Tool?
Competitor analysis tools (also called competitor analysis software, competitor monitoring tools, or competitor research tools) are exactly what they sound like. They analyze your competitors to help you identify strengths and weaknesses, collect market intelligence, and make strategic decisions.
What Are the Core Functionalities of Competitor Analysis Software?
Core functionalities include but are not limited to:
- Keyword research. By analyzing the keywords your competitors are targeting, you can gain a better understanding of their content strategy and discover new opportunities to optimize your own website.
- Social media monitoring. Get information on their followership, engagement levels, and even track brand mentions and sentiment towards them online.
- Website traffic monitoring. Learn where competitors’ website traffic is coming from, monthly search volume, search ranking positions, and more.
- Backlink profiling. See who’s linking to your competitors’ websites and how those backlinks are helping their SEO.
These are just a few examples of what you can do with competitor analysis tools. The ultimate goal is to understand what makes you unique from your online counterparts and communicate these differences to your customers.
For more info, see our blog post How to Do a Competitor Analysis. Or keep reading to discover the best tools for your competitive strategy.
Why You Need Competitor Analysis Tools
Understanding your competition not only helps you identify potential threats and opportunities but also gives you valuable insights into what works and what doesn't in your industry.
Tools for competitor analysis provide a comprehensive view of your competitors' online presence, including their website traffic, social media engagements, keyword rankings, and backlink profiles — showing you an apples-to-apples comparison with your own brand.
By comparing metrics such as website traffic and search engine rankings, you can identify areas where you are falling behind or excelling. You can use these insights to make decisions and devise more effective strategies to stay ahead.
In addition to competitor benchmarking, competitor analysis can help you surface consumer preferences that may have slipped under your radar. For instance, by analyzing competitor keywords, you might identify a gap in the market that you could turn into a growth opportunity.
There are lots of ways to use competitor analysis tools to your advantage. Let’s look at some specific tools and software and how you can apply them:
What Are the Best Competitor Analysis Tools on the Market?
We’ve rounded up the best competitor analysis tools to show how you can see what your competitors are up to. Consider adding one or more to your digital strategy.
Best for social media and PR: Meltwater
Best for SEO: Ahrefs
Best for website authority: Moz
Best for content trends: BuzzSumo
Best for keyword trends: SpyFu
Best for follower tracking: Social Blade
Best for website traffic Monitoring: Similarweb
Best for email marketing: Mailcharts
Best for social media and PR: Meltwater
Meltwater is the most comprehensive PR database and technology platform, helping you build a well-rounded strategy on a single platform. It combines social listening, brand monitoring, consumer intelligence, media relations, and influencer marketing in one, and competitor analysis plays a role in each of these key areas.
With social listening analytics, brands can monitor for mentions of specific keywords, trends, topics, or even other brands. Learn what people are saying about those terms and how they’re talking about them. For example, you can tell whether people are speaking fondly of a competitor online or if customer expectations aren’t being met.
Customer intelligence tools give you an inside look at who your audience is and what they need and want. This can be game-changing information for competitive analysis, as you can learn who else your customers are doing business with.
Meltwater’s AI-driven features will also transform unstructured data from online conversations into usable insights and science-backed predictions, helping you move the needle forward.
Other ways to use Meltwater for competitive analysis include:
- Conducting an influencer marketing competitor audit to find out which influencers your competitors are using
- Measuring share of voice and brand sentiment
- Tracking brand reputation
- Monitoring social media topics and conversations
- Connecting with journalists, bloggers, podcasters, etc. who can help grow your voice
Overall, Meltwater provides a solid foundation for competitor analysis — and what happens next.
Best for SEO: Ahrefs
A popular name in SEO optimization, Ahrefs is packed with competitive analysis features that help users reverse engineer their competitors’ online strategies.
Ahrefs provides detailed insights into a website's backlink profile. It allows you to explore the backlinks of your competitors, revealing the sources, anchor text, and authority of those links. This helps you identify which websites are linking to your competitors and assess the quality of those links.
Also on the menu is keyword research. You can analyze the search volume, keyword difficulty, and potential traffic for the keywords your competitors are ranking for, helping you identify lucrative opportunities. This data also helps you understand more about their content strategy, including their top-performing pages and organic traffic potential.
Other essential Ahrefs features include:
- Rank tracking to monitor search engine rankings
- Site audit to surface technical SEO issues
- Customizable alerts for when competitors gain or lose keywords
These are all packed into a user-friendly interface so you can gain instant insights and make faster decisions.
Best for website authority: Moz
Another big name in SEO, Moz offers some of the same functionality as Ahrefs. In terms of competitive analysis, Moz also offers a unique feature that adds an extra piece of the puzzle — Domain Authority.
Domain Authority (DA) is a metric created by Moz to estimate a website’s online authority. This is measured on a scale of 1 to 100 — the higher the DA, the more authority a website appears to have. Higher-authority websites will usually rank higher for a topic compared to sites with a lower DA.
Digging a layer deeper, Moz will also display the authority of individual pages, a metric called Page Authority. For example, if you’re writing a blog on the same topic as a competitor, you can check the competitor’s Page Authority for that blog to learn how well it might rank in organic search.
You can download the Moz toolbar for free and instantly see a website’s DA or PA. This makes it easy to add this layer to any competitive analysis strategy.
Best for content trends: BuzzSumo
For content and social media marketing, BuzzSumo offers a straightforward way to find trending topics to post about. But it also plays a part as a competitive analysis tool, specifically in giving you a bird’s eye view of your competitors’ content ideas.
BuzzSumo helps you discover the most popular content from your competitors. You can see which articles, blog posts, infographics, videos, and other content formats have gained the most shares and engagement. This allows you to identify the topics and content types that resonate with your audience.
You can also learn more about the influencers your competitors are working with or who is organically sharing their content. You can use these or similar influencers to amplify your own reach.
One of BuzzSumo’s most helpful features in terms of competitive analysis software is the ability to compare competitors side by side. Easily identify trends, strengths, and weaknesses in your niche all on one page.
Spotting trending topics in true BuzzSumo fashion can help you create impactful, relevant content before your competitors do.
Tip: Take a look at the best content marketing tools on the market.
Best for keyword trends: SpyFu
SpyFu stands out among keyword research tools because of its ability to monitor keyword trends and show you the keywords your competitors are buying for their ad campaigns. What’s more, this data isn’t limited to the campaigns your competitors are currently running — you can get a full history of the keywords that have driven all of their campaigns.
This level of competitive analysis is a major upgrade from manual keyword research. Rather than manually typing in a term and gathering data, you can jump straight into your competitors’ strategies. They’ve done the heavy lifting, and you reap the benefits.
It gets better. You can also view the exact ad copy your competitors are running on platforms like Google Ads. See everywhere they’re showing up on Google and other data you can’t find anywhere else in one place.
Best for follower tracking: Social Blade
Monitoring how your competitors are performing on social media is a critical piece of competitive analysis. Even if you think your competitors are killing it on social, the data might say otherwise. Social media monitoring tools like Meltwater or Social Blade provide you that data.
That’s why Social Blade is one of the best tools for competitor analysis. It shows you a live follower count as well as a daily follower update so you can see how your competitor’s audience changes over time. Are they losing followers? Gaining new followers? And in either case, why?
One cool feature is the grading tool that assigns a letter grade to a brand’s social media presence. This feature uses a combination of the average Retweets and likes to show whether people are loving what a brand is posting. You can also compare several brands side by side to see how their social followings stack up.
Social Blade shows insights for Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and others.
Best for website traffic Monitoring: Similarweb
Content and a sizable social media following aren’t the only indicators of a competitor’s success. Without website traffic, your competitors may be struggling to attract and convert the right target audience. And if that’s the case and you’re mirroring your strategy after theirs, your own efforts will also fall short.
Similarweb is a great competitor analysis tool because it focuses solely on website traffic patterns. It provides data on your competitors' website traffic, including the number of visitors, page views, and engagements. This helps you understand how popular and engaging their websites are in comparison to yours.
The tool breaks down the sources of your competitors' website traffic, such as search engines, social media, direct traffic, and referrals. This helps you see where your competitors’ traffic is coming from so you can capitalize on the best traffic sources.
Other helpful features include:
- The most popular content based on engagement
- Mobile app performance insights
- Global market presence
- Keyword analysis
Gaining insights like these will help you build a stronger online presence in the right places.
Best for email marketing: Mailcharts
Your competitor’s email marketing stats might seem hard to come by, but Mailcharts is pulling back the curtain on essential campaign metrics.
MailCharts tracks your competitors’ email campaigns and shows you the emails they send, the frequency of their campaigns, and the content they feature. Design analysis helps you assess things like layout and messaging strategies.
You can also analyze the subject lines your competitors use in their emails. Subject lines are crucial for open rates, so understanding what works for your competitors can inspire your own.
Other helpful MailCharts features include:
- Market segmentation and targeting data
- Promotion tracking
- Holiday and seasonal email examples
- CTAs and conversion data
Email data that was once hard to come by (especially without subscribing to your competitors’ email list) is now at your fingertips.
Tip: Learn how to run a successful email marketing campaign and how to measure your email campaign performance.
Using Meltwater for the Best Competitor Analysis
The right competitor analysis services and tools can help you craft a winning strategy that will help you get ahead and make a real difference. Whether you’re just getting started or are building on your existing competitor analysis tools, Meltwater gives you unparalleled features and value that start delivering results right away.
Learn more when you request a demo by filling out the form below.
