It’s one thing to have great content and products, but unless you know your competitors – all of that goes for naught. This poses a question..do you really have all the time and energy in the world to dig up the dirt on your competitors? No? I thought so. That’s why it’s important to have an arsenal of tools to help you along the way. Luckily for you, there are some great resources online that will help you really find your competitor’s strength and weaknesses. Here are 15 solid tools to help you get ahead of your competitors.
1. Topsy
If you’re an avid Twitter user, this is a great resource for you to use. Data analysis is key to success for a lot of businesses. Topsy gives you great insight into searching your competitors’ tweets all from the very start. This is great because you can see different trends that happen in regards to retweets, responses, and more. Finding out the most trending tweets will show you their market and maybe any openings that they may not touch. Another great gem is knowing the top links of the past 25 hours. Everything from velocity, peak, and metrics are all weighed so you can find out what really resonates. Also, be privy to the image content. Images are very powerful especially on Twitter because people tend to favorite and retweet different pictures along with the content a lot more. Here’s a great article for Topsy called “6 Reasons to Use Topsy – The Free Twitter Social Analytics Tool.”
2. SE Ranking
This is a great site to find out what competitors dominate on the search engine. You’ll find that you can measure up to five different projects per site to view ranking on target regions and search engines. Get a little bit more in-depth with information such as traffic forecasts, website visibility, and even first page data. It’s good to have a daily view into these statistics so you can make headway with your competitors. Also, you’ll find your improvements and strengths as time goes by. Really find what key terms and what inner pages/subdomains work well with the search engine so you can do some deep SEO tweaking for the longevity of your site. Additionally, there’s an app for iPhone and Android users who want to check their stats on the go. Perfect for the everyday traveler. Curious on how to use SE tracking to your benefit? Here’s a great article from SEO Hacker called “New Kid on the Block: SE Ranking Tool.”
3. InfiniGraph
Finding trends in the social media department is extremely important because these types of things become viral. What’s a hot topic on social media easily becomes news worldwide, and that does a lot for your business. InfiniGraph bridges the gap between consumer-to-brand interactions in real time as well as uses a special targeting system to find unique trends and content that are relevant right now. You’ll develop a great campaign by finding out the main influencers using social intelligence. These keywords will help you break through your competition and find out what your target audience likes. To get a gist of what Infinigraph’s about, please check out “What Every Social Media Marketer Should Know About Infinigraph.”
4. Alexa
Alexa is really a staple when it comes to gaining information about your website and your competitors’ websites. It’s all about having that competitive edge between you and your adversaries in this web battlefield. Alexa is a standalone tool and really still has the notoriety as far as ranking website’s authority. Not to mention, you can spy on competitors’ backlinks, traffic, keywords, and more. If you are just starting to break through with your own website, it’s not a bad idea to take a look at different sites in your niche and see if you can exploit some weaknesses. Also, you’ll find some key strategies from your competitors. Learn how they gain traffic and the demographics they target. It may prove useful for your own brand.
Check out this post “Infographic: The Anatomy of an Alexa Site Audit.”
5. SpyFu
Whether you use Google Adwords or just the organic search engine, you’ll find a lot of use for this program to help you come up with your own strategy. Through Adwords, you’ll get an understanding of how much certain keywords can cost which helps you think of a budget before taking action completely blind. Also, the organic search engine traffic will help you decide the different trends in the market and see if it’s worth focusing your content on particular keywords for a short or long-term basis. Use this site to check out different niches, keywords, and even create experiments to help you test different techniques.
6. Monitor Backlinks
This is one of the newer resources out there but it proves very effective in creating a backlink strategy to knock out your competition. The key about this site is it allows you to track competitors’ backlinks, disclose the negative link juice, and write great content that’s renders more link bait. Keyword positioning is imperative especially when you want help get more good backlinks to a specific site. Use this site to your advantage to see what links are good and bad so you know how to learn from your competitors’ mistakes and the things they do right.
7. iSpionage
A very unique name that serves its purpose. If you are into different campaigns whether it’s PPC, social media, or organic traffic, this is one of the best sites to use. Some of the tools that you can use in this SEO program include: SEO competitive research, social monitoring, and keyword tracking. The real gem to this program is actual real data you gain from the competitors such as the type of ads they run, the amount of money spent, and different comparison graphs. Real data analysis in your fingertips – that’s true power. Here are a few iSpionage tutorials.
8. Open Site Explorer
This is a solid linking program from MOZ that allows you to monitor backlinks. You’ll find details on how to get data on page and domain authority, anchor text, and boost your links. Moz analytics helps you to track your site’s link profile over time and compare it your competitors. Ultimately, you’ll never be out of the loop when it comes to finding new link opportunities or taking advantage of links that your competitor doesn’t see. And don’t simply take our word for it. From +100 SEO professionals who participated in GoodFirms’s research on SEO trends and tactics, more than 50% said that they would opt for MOZ solutions. Seems like their tools have more popularity among SEO’s than one can think. You’ll find some excellent data on SlideShare’s “Link Building with Open Site Explorer.”
9. Followerwonk
Get keen data on different Twitter profiles and find out how you can maximize data within your niche to come up with a great Twitter marketing strategy. You have options as far as analyzing different tweets, followers, locations, and content to see what resonates best for your target market.
Moz actually posted a recent Youtube video on “Using Followerwonk to Find the Best Times to Tweet.”
10. Moat
This is another quality service that allows for measure on Twitter and Facebook. Here’s a great link to some of the new features of Moat – “100% In-View Impression Buying and Ad Analytics Partnership with Moat.” The Pro version is more powerful with digital marketing intelligence for different brands, agencies, and publishers. The unique feature is they give you video content to measure the different strategies used by your competitors and how video ads play a major role in creative marketing.
11. Ontolo
Perfect for backlink monitoring and content marketing. If you need assistance with finding new content topics and different authors who have great authority, this is certainly a great tool to use. You’ll see that there are some great influencers in the market and you can easily reach out to them whether it’s for a post or simply to pick their brains on some topics. Ontolo makes it easy for you by creating a five step program with their instant prospect reports.
12. SpyOnWeb
If you want to find what IP addresses are the same for domains, this is perfect. Knowing your competition is important from the products, the sites, and the strategies they use. Learn why they have certain businesses that dominate the web. You can even get down to the nitty grit with their Google Adsense and Google Analytics id. Just go to the site and type in the URL and you’ll find all domain names and IP addresses correlating to that particular URL. There’s a nice little break down of this at Jess Coburn’s “spyonweb.com: A Great Tool for Competitor Analysis.”
13. Simply Measured
If you need raw data on social metrics, this is a tool you need in your arsenal. One of the best ways to help you standout from your opponent is just staying ahead of the game. That’s why it’s important to know their trends, branding, traffic, and conversions. What makes this tool very useful is the fact that you can get this type of data in 35 different reports. By knowing the different competitor strategies that work, that can save you time from performing tasks that may honestly throw you off your game. You can measure their Klout score which determines the social media presence. Additionally, you’ll see how their engagement and followers change over time. You really want to be heavily vested in knowing how their metrics work to find a void in the market. Strategically, you’ll be in a place where you can slowly but surely take over.
14. Compete PRO
Compete PRO is one of the premier tools used to really keep your competition on its toes. It’s as very intelligent tool that helps you measure passive online consumer behavior, seasonal trends between competitors, and demographic information. These are beneficial to help you come up with plans for different times of the year. Whether you want to test out a different way of promoting products or find out how your rivals cater to specific audiences, you’ll be able to come up with a great strategy for your business. Also, you’ll find that the data used can help you find trends within your own traffic to really get the most out of your site. The data from your rivals’ conversion rates, shopping engagement, and even your customers who shop on your competitors’ sites are all summed up in charts. You can find out what you lack so you can start ensuring that your customers don’t go towards your competitors for products.
15. Quantcast
Knowing your competition is one thing, but knowing your audience is another. It’s all about applying the knowledge to help you be the best marketer you can become. What Quantcast does is help you find potential clients by looking at the following: demographics, lifestyle and interest, website, target audience insights, and conversion rates. From this data alone, you can improve your overall marketing plans and get a better notion of what your audience likes and dislikes. This is very valuable because you can create better campaigns that will save you time and money for your long and short term goals. This is one of the most effective ways to find your next customers.
When choosing the right analytics & ranking tool you need to have in mind that the tool needs to assist you in your work and with it help to bring you more quality organic traffic and rankings. Such tool is Linkio which offers the right anchor text percentage usage in order to move beyond competitors in a pretty fast time.
There’s nothing like having an extra set of tools to help you in your business. SEO still plays a great role in doing well online, but it’s all about how you use the data to benefit your business. Point out the strengths and weaknesses in others and find out how to milk them for your own benefit. What are some SEO tools you use to help your business prosper? Drop a note below.
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