If you’re not competitive in SEO, you’re going to fall behind. It’s the unfortunate truth. Staying competitive is key to staying ahead of the SEO game. One way to stay competitive? Closely monitoring your competition.
There are many tools you can use to quickly and efficiently gather data and information about competitors’ SEO, which helps improve SEO results for any website or business competing within the space.
No matter which industry, area or segment you’re in, find out what it takes to make your SEO results better than the competition’s with these three powerful tools.
1. Serpstat
This powerful SEO and growth-hacking tool, available in both free and paid forms, helps you find competitors, see top pages, see top keywords and much more. Serpstat has four different pricing tiers, offering benefits for all budget types.
How to Use It
Using the free version, I’ll show you exactly how Serpstat helps you spy on your competitors. Once you sign up for a free account, you’ll be taken to your dashboard, where you can navigate through different sections on the left.
Scroll all the way down to find the Competitors section on the left-hand navigation.
Here, you’ll find the different areas of data Serpstat provides: Organic search, ads, domain comparison and batch analysis.
Check out your top competitors in organic search by first entering your website in the top search bar.
Then, a list of your top organic search competitors pulls up, helping you learn all kinds of interesting things about them.
Click on the magnifying glass to learn more about common and missing keywords. You’ll be able to compare positioning, premium search additions (in icons to the left), and basic keyword information like volume, CPC and competition.
This is where the free vs. paid model is different. You only get to see 10 common or missing keywords here and more in paid versions. However, in both you can export your data, which is a very useful feature.
Missing and common keywords are important so you can see how you’re doing in comparison to your competitors on common keywords, but also you can see what keywords are missing from your website.
Within the organic search section, you’ll also find a graph for domain keywords distribution, as well as a graph section for domain keyword and visibility shares.
In the Ads section, you'll automatically see (since you have already put in your base URL) a list of competitors in ads.
Functioning the same as the previous option, click on the magnifying glass for common and missing keywords, revealing more or less based on what Serpstat plan you’re on. This is a great tool and data source for your website’s PPC manager.
Next, the domain comparison tool lets you compare your website with websites of your choice or use its suggestions as a guide.
This tool helps you see how domains compare to each other visually.
Last but not least, we'll discuss an extremely useful section called Competitors/Batch Analysis. In the free version, compare up to 200 domains with any of its provided parameters. Got a list of domains that you can easily copy and paste? This is the way to go.
How to Implement Your Findings
Serpstat’s SEO tool certainly offers a lot of insight into competitors’ keywords, rankings and much more. My advice is to save the data you get. Go through it and gather insights. What are they doing that we aren’t? How can we implement these changes?
Whether it’s adding missing keywords, ramping up certain keywords or making tweaks with something else you found, this is a great guide to catch up to the competition or stay ahead.
Interested to know more about Serpstat? Here is a detailed review.
2. Majestic
Majestic is a powerful marketing search engine and backlink checker that helps you to analyze the backlinks of both you and your competition. This tool is available in both free and paid versions, with the paid subscription plans listed below.
How to Use It
If you register for the free Majestic version, you’ll receive a limited number of Majestic’s link intelligence tools. They have 14 total.
One of the best Majestic SEO tools is Site Explorer. In the free version, you have limited searches, so if you need to do more than one per day, I’d recommend getting a paid version. It’s worth it.
Check out your competitor’s top backlinks. The information here is extremely helpful to improve your own backlink strategy.
Check your competitor’s anchor text distribution and keywords.
Another tool that comes with the paid models is the Bulk Backlink Checker. This tool’s Topical Trust Flow feature is very interesting and provides a ton of great information about your competitors’ backlinks.
The SEO tools on Majestic’s website are an SEO pro’s dream. If you’re doing SEO regularly, the paid version is definitely worth it. If you’re wanting a smaller package, the Silver will probably cover all of your needs.
How to Implement Your Findings
Depending on which version you have, the sky is pretty much the limit. This is a very powerful tool to do extensive backlink analysis. You’ll definitely find things to help improve your backlink strategy and help your websites achieve better SEO results. Whether you choose the free or paid version, you’re definitely going to love this SEO tool.
3. SEOquake
SEOquake is an essential plugin for managing SEO, period. Its offerings are in-depth, accurate and easy to understand. Powered by SEMrush, you’ll get everything you need from this powerful plugin, available for Firefox, Chrome and Opera browsers.
When you first install it, you’ll probably want to turn on the SERP overlays, available in the app’s settings.
How to Use It
When it comes to checking up on your competitors using SEOquake, you’ll be able to easily, at any time, check up on your competition’s meta tags, keyword density, internal/external links, and more. Whenever you’re on a page, simply click on the SEOquake plugin on your browser and navigate through the top menu to click on the section that you need.
Click page info to check out the meta info, link count, etc.
From there, you can browse through the diagnosis, internal and external links, keyword density, etc. The diagnosis tab brings up a page analysis, giving direction as to how to fix yours or your competitors’ errors, as well as showing where the competitor has done a good job.
You can browse through all of the website’s links that are on that particular page (or domain). Amazing, huh? Click the “refresh” icons to bring up the results for that particular link or parameter.
Keyword density is a great tool for optimizing pages, in general, and this can be a good guide if the competitor is also getting good SEO results.
Obviously, you can access all of these from the main app menu, too.
SEOquake is such a handy tool. It is completely free and with only one click, you can see loads of information on your competitors.
How to Implement Your Findings
Seeing your competitors’ meta information, on-page SEO information, and internal and external links is extremely beneficial for the details of your SEO strategy. Whether you’re wanting to build up your links and don’t know where to start, or you want to compare your optimization to your high ranking competitors, this tool can get you the results you want to see.
Get Started Spying on Your Competitors
These three powerful SEO tools provide extensive insights into your competitors’ SEO results, helping you tweak, configure and produce the best results possible for the websites you manage.
Since the Internet is constantly changing, it’s a good idea to continue to use SEO analyzing tools regularly to get updates on your competitors’ SEO results. Depending on how much time you have, I’d suggest a minimum of once a month and once a week if possible, for each domain you need.
Staying on top of your competition is vital to your SEO results. If you don’t make tweaks, test changes and stay active reviewing their SEO, it’s likely that you won’t get the best results possible.
Stay in the game by spying on your competitors with these 3 powerful SEO tools, and then, you can quickly and efficiently improve your SEO strategy and results with your findings!
