Competitor analysis is crucial for any startup that wants to succeed. Like many entrepreneurs, you would do anything to excel in your field. Sometimes, this involves adopting unconventional strategies, including a certain amount of competitor “observation”, which never hurts, right? Rest assured, we are not suggesting invading someone’s privacy. However, in the business world, it is essential to keep an eye on your competition! Carefully monitoring your competitors to uncover their strategies can inspire you to improve and expand your business.
In this article, we will explore the best competitive intelligence tools that will help you with these analyses. From free tools that reveal the technologies behind a website, to services that analyze a competitor’s site in detail, providing information such as affinity with other online businesses, traffic sources, and more.
Startups often struggle to define an effective SEO strategy; these tools can help you discover competitors’ backlinks to adopt winning tactics. Also interesting are the plugins that track the LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and AngelList profiles of people who contact you via email.
Social Media Competitor Analysis Tools
Sprout Social
Sprout Social lets you analyze your competitors’ social media activities from multiple perspectives and metrics. Use Sprout’s competitive analysis package to refine your social media strategy with detailed data accessible across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Whether you want to take a look at your rivals’ posts or compare your growth to that of the profiles analyzed, it’s all possible in just a few clicks, eliminating manual research and complicated spreadsheets. Elevate your analysis with Sprout’s Premium Analytics tool, which offers deeper insights into your social platforms, accompanied by interactive charts and graphs that can be customized to your goals. You can also dive deeper using Sprout’s Social Listening tool, which lets you tap into public conversations on social media to uncover consumer sentiment about your competitors’ products and services, as well as analyze your market share in the industry. With direct access to consumer sentiment, Sprout makes it easy to identify opportunities to differentiate your brand from your rivals.
Phlanx
This Instagram engagement calculator shows you how active a given account’s followers are. It’s a great tool for analyzing your competitors’ Instagram engagement and also for verifying the authenticity of an influencer’s following. Phlanx engagement is calculated by comparing the number of followers to the frequency of content interaction (likes, comments, etc.). This highlights the importance of engagement over the simple number of followers, providing a more meaningful measure of content resonance.
Modash
Modash is an influencer marketing platform that makes it easy to discover, analyze, and track influencers across platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, and allows influencers to benchmark their competition. It offers a database of over 250 million creators, providing detailed data on their profiles and engagement metrics. Modash features include a search engine to find influencers, detailed analytics like engagement rate and fake followers, and campaign tracking. Modash is compatible with Shopify to track collaboration conversions.
Social Blade
Social Blade is a fun tool for monitoring big brands on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Commonly used to gauge the popularity of celebrities and YouTubers, it also offers valuable insights for marketers. It provides daily follower updates and real-time counts. A cool feature is the ability to directly compare brands’ social presence.
AI-Based Competitive Analysis Tools
Kompyte
Kompyte is a competitive intelligence tool that automatically centralizes competitor updates into one easy-to-use dashboard. It includes up-to-date information from their websites, review sites, content, social media, ads, job listings, and more. Easy to monitor competitor updates to keep an eye on the activity of brands in your industry. Kompyte also helps build sales comparison sheets based on competitor data, useful for your sales team.
Crayon
Crayon is an AI tool that facilitates both competitor analysis and competitive intelligence. It allows users to create a dashboard of competitive updates that are automatically populated and organized, allowing brands to stay on top of competitor activity. Crayon also offers collaboration features, ensuring teams can work together to manage and monitor competitive information. It also includes the ability to create sales comparison documents and customizable reports.
Competitor Analysis Tools for SEO
SEMRush
SEMRush is one of the most renowned SEO tools, known for its advanced competitor analysis capabilities. With SEMRush, you can track your competitors’ backlinks and monitor their SEO ranking changes. This tool is indispensable for understanding who your real competitors are from an SEO perspective. It also highlights the keyword strategies adopted by your competitors, which directly influences your content strategy.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs offers a powerful site explorer that lets you check the top organic keywords for any URL. You’ll get estimates of how much traffic your competitors are attracting for those keywords. It’s also easy to analyze a site’s top-performing content based on backlinks. This information is crucial for understanding which messages or products resonate the most with your audience. Ahrefs also helps you identify which keywords are driving the most traffic to your competitors’ sites.
MozBar
This browser extension from Moz shows a site’s Domain Authority, a measure of how likely it is to rank well in search engines. MozBar is an excellent tool for quickly assessing a site’s potential search engine visibility. Installed in your browser, MozBar allows you to perform “passive” competitive analysis while visiting competitors’ sites, giving you an immediate view of their SEO performance.
Competitor Analysis Tools for Content
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo lets you explore the most effective content related to your topics of interest and your competitors. This tool analyzes engagement on social sites and total online shares. It helps you understand who is dominating your industry in terms of content and gives you insights into topics of interest that you may want to explore.
Similarweb
Similarweb offers a comprehensive analysis for both content and SEO. You can dig into your competitors’ content and find out where their traffic comes from. For example, you can analyze a site’s referral traffic and where it redirects its visitors. For content marketers, Similarweb shows what topics visitors search for and what other relevant sites they visit.
Feedly
Feedly is a content aggregator that organizes and archives content as it is published, including that of your competitors. This allows you to track the topics your rivals are covering, all in one interface.
Competitor Analysis Tools for Email, Ads and Industries
Mailcharts
Mailcharts aggregates emails from your competitors’ campaigns to help you shape your email marketing strategies. In addition to collecting subject lines, Mailcharts analyzes data such as sending frequency and compares it to your campaigns to gauge your ranking. Not only does this tool provide powerful competitive analysis, but it also offers numerous email examples to inspire your own campaigns.
Owletter
Owletter automatically collects your competitors’ emails and organizes them in an intuitive dashboard. Analyze trends in your competitors’ email sending frequencies to help you optimize your communication timing.
iSpionage
If you are interested in your competitors’ paid ads, iSpionage is the perfect tool. It analyzes various aspects of your PPC campaigns, including the number of keywords targeted on AdWords. You can also see who else is competing for the same ads and what monthly budget is planned for these campaigns.
Owler
Owler uses community data to curate relevant updates and content for startups in your industry. Enter brands of interest to create a custom dashboard and track competitor movements.
Competitive Analysis Tools for Technology
BuiltWith
BuiltWith.com is a tool that provides insights into the technology used on websites. This site analyzes websites to identify third-party technologies used, such as CMS, hosting, front-end frameworks, plugins, and more. BuiltWith.com is a useful resource for web developers, market researchers, and marketers, providing insight into target audiences, competition, and market trends.
Wappalyzer
Wappalyzer.com is a browser extension that detects technologies used on websites you visit. It identifies CMS, JavaScript frameworks, front-end libraries, web servers, analytics systems, and more. Wappalyzer is useful for web developers, market researchers, and marketers interested in discovering technologies used on websites.
WhatRuns
WhatRuns is a free extension for Google Chrome that automatically identifies the technologies used on websites you visit. It recognizes CMS, themes, plugins and other tools used, displaying all the technologies detected on the page, including content management systems and front-end frameworks. WhatRuns is especially useful for web developers, designers and digital marketers who want to understand the technological structure of websites.
In conclusion, understanding and analyzing your competitors is crucial for any business that wants to stay competitive in today’s dynamic market. Using the competitive analysis tools we’ve explored in this article can provide valuable insights and essential data that can help your startup or business navigate the competitive landscape more effectively.
Whether you’re looking to optimize your social media presence, improve your SEO strategies, or better understand the technologies that power your competitors, there are tools designed to make these complex analyses more accessible and understandable. Investing in the right competitor analysis software will not only help you stay ahead of the curve, but also help you stay ahead of your competitors, allowing you to innovate and differentiate yourself in your industry.
Ultimately, while the challenges of competitive monitoring are significant, the tools available today make these tasks more manageable, allowing you to make informed decisions that drive success. Whether you are starting a new venture or looking to expand an established business, competitive analysis is a critical element that cannot be overlooked. Use the technologies and resources available to ensure you have a competitive edge in your field.
