Monitoring your competition is one of the most important things that you can do to remain relevant to SEO. Primarily, if you search for your business or the competing ones on the best SERP tracking tool, you will realize that your rankings keep changing all the time. The fluid nature of your ranking shows that you must continuously check what the competition is doing and respond to their actions. But for you to do this accordingly, you must use the best tools. Having the best tools can enable you to track what competing sites are doing and implement the right strategies to improve your performance. The following are the five best competitor analysis tools that you can use for the purpose.
- Monitor Backlinks
Monitor Backlinks has been designed to watch the kind of links that competitor sites have. In SEO practice, links are relevant because they determine the overall quality of websites. If credible sites link back to yours, then it shows that the owners of the sites believe that you have high-quality content. Thus, it is the goal of every owner of general sites to have valuable backlinks. You can learn a lot about the backlinks that you need to have by looking at those of your competitors. Monitor Backlinks is a great tool that you can use to follow what your two top competitors are doing. Once you sign up for the service, you will get periodic detailed information about the new links that your competitors have. You can then use the information to fine-tune your backlinks strategy.
- SEMrush
You know SEMrush as a complete SEO tool for small and big websites. However, you can use this tool to monitor what your competitors are doing. Typically, SEMrush allows you to look at the way some of the sites in your industry perform regarding the use of keywords, their ranking on search results and other vital metrics. If you use this tool, you can effectively respond to what your competitors are doing because you will have all the information. For example, you can evaluate the keywords that work for your competition. Using the data, you can quickly research on the right keywords and develop content that suits the needs of your clients.
- Alexa
Alexa is another valuable tool that you can rely on when you need to monitor the activities of your competitors. Alexa provides detailed information about the performance of websites across the world. When you pay for the exceptional service that allows you to view what you direct competitors are doing, you can get all the information about their sites. Some of the details about your competition that you can collect using Alexa include the daily number of viewers, the average time that new people spend on the site and others. Armed with this information, you can adjust a few aspects of your site to reduce your bounce rates, increase page views and maintain your rankings on standard search results.
- BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo allows you to analyze the SEO performance of the leading websites in your industry. For either the primary or paid membership plan of the tool, you can determine the kinds of keywords that your competitors are using. You can then utilize the information to enhance your keyword research. Also, the tool enables you to get a general idea of the kind of sites that trend at any given moment. Information about sites that are very popular helps you to learn how to adjust your strategy and avoid common mistakes that undermine your SEO performance.
- iSpionage
iSpionage is a crucial tool that enables you to understand the advertising performance of your competitors. Primarily, this tool provides information related to the size of the advertising budget and PPC strategies that your competitors use. Hence, once you acquire it, you can gain the upper hand over your competitors regarding the issue of advertising.
In summary, there are many tools that you can use to monitor the performance of the best sites in your industry. The tools range from those that enable you to understand the keyword strategies that the sites use to those that provide detailed information about the advertising strategies that the other sites use. Moreover, the tools may help you to learn about the kind of backlinks you need to maintain for your website for you to improve your performance.
