10 Tools to Monitor Your Competitors’ Growth and Hack Their Strategies

As a savvy entrepreneur, you understand that your business doesn’t operate in a bubble. There are many outside factors that can determine whether or not your business will turn a profit – and one of the biggest factors is your competition in the market.

What’s more, you’re not just competing with a few local businesses anymore. Thanks to the Internet, your competition has increased tenfold. That’s why it’s critical that you take measures to always remain one step ahead of them. But, as I’m sure you’re aware, that’s not as easy as it sounds.

Positioning yourself as unique compared to your competitors is only part of the solution. An equally important part is monitoring their growth and hacking their strategies.

As daunting a task that may seem, there are a many online tools that can help you do just that. Here’s my list of the top ten tools that can help you keep tabs on your competition.

1) Google Alerts

Any list of online monitoring tools is incomplete without the Google Alerts tool, primarily because it’s one of the easiest tools to use. All you have to do is sign into your Google account, and you’re good to go.

Simply enter the names of the competitors you want to track, and the tool takes care of the rest. Depending on what you want to track, you can set up the tool to monitor their online mentions, links, and keywords.

Every time one of your competitors gets a mention, you will receive an email report with the latest relevant information. The fact that it’s a free tool makes it even more enticing.

Further Reading:

• 10 Google Search Console Hacks to Boost SEO
• Google Like a Pro: 42 of the Most Useful Google Search Tricks
• 6 Ways Google Ads Can Boost Your SEO Results
• 8 Tips to Improve AdWords Housekeeping and Maximize Success

2) Social Mention

According to a recent report on marketing trends, 71% of small businesses intend to use social media to gain more customers. That’s reason enough for you to be tracking your competitors on social media and Social Mention can help you with that:

Just search for keywords or brands on it and the tool will show you what people are saying about them. It also informs you about how often a brand earns a mention.

You can tweak your own efforts depending on the insights you gain from the tool. For instance, if a rival has a lot of negative comments, you can learn from their mistakes and avoid them yourself. Similarly, in the case of positive comments, you can emulate if not improve their tactics.

3) Google Ad(Word)s Keyword Planner

You’re probably wondering what Google Keyword Planner is doing on this list. After all, everyone uses it for their keyword research. But not everyone is aware of how to leverage it for competitor analysis.

There’s a lot of insightful data you can find on your competitors if you know how to use the tool well. One place to start is by plugging in their URL in the landing page field. This way you can retrieve the keywords they’re using and the average traffic they’re earning.

You can also research their ad campaigns to look for long-tail keywords that you can leverage yourself.

Note: Google AdWords is now Google Ads.

4) Pro Rank Tracker

Here’s the kicker – while you can use Keyword Planner to manually research keywords, that’s not the most effective solution. That’s where Pro Rank Tracker comes to your rescue:

Just input your competitors’ websites and the tool gives you a group of keywords and their rankings. You can even decide which search engine you want to track these keywords on.

The biggest perk of Pro Rank Tracker, though, is that you can localize your search and optimize your local SEO strategy. This is why it’s a particularly useful tool for a local businesses to use in their competitive analysis.

Further Reading:

• The 8 Best Outbound Sales Automation Tools for Cold Emailing
• 6 Tools that Make Tracking Your Influencer Marketing Campaigns Easy
• 7 Unusual Marketing Tools That’ll Help You Grow [podcast]
• The Top 5 SEO Tools To Skyrocket Your Organic Traffic

5) SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is another very handy tool to have in your toolkit when conducting competitor research. It helps you keep an eye on your competitors’ online strategies and analytics.

The versatile tool helps you dig into different sites, apps and platforms. Just type in the website or mobile app and click “search.” Compare statistics from multiple competitors, identify emerging industry trends, and understand customer behavior.

SimilarWeb mines raw data, processes and organizes it, and then produces the reports that you need.

6) SEMrush

One of the most difficult parts of competitive analysis is converting data into actionable insights. But with an all-in-one tool like SEMrush, competitive analysis is a piece of cake. It covers various digital marketing aspects like PPC, SEO, content, and more.

All you need to do is input the website you want to research and the tool gives you a graphic report with relevant data, including traffic, rank, ads, and keywords.

You can also compare different sites, including your own, side-by-side to see where you’re leading or lagging behind.

SEMrush provides you with complete data after analyzing your competition so that you are able to make faster and smarter decisions. The tool offers several features that quickly uncover your competitor’s most successful SEO, content, and social media practices:

• Under the organic research tab, you can see the top domains that are competing with your site in Google. You can identify your competitors’ exact keywords and exact web pages that are ranking in Google.
• You can easily monitor the new and lost links of your competition and explore all the link metrics in great detail.
• With the help of the Backlink Gap analysis tool, you can compare the top organic, unique keywords of 5 of your main competitors and quickly compile a list of the best keywords that you might have overlooked. You can also compare your backlink profile against your competitors and plan your link-building campaign accordingly.

7) Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another noteworthy member of this list because, much like SEMrush, it can help you with all aspects of competitive analysis. Its strength, however, lies in analyzing link targets and backlinks.

Ahrefs is a fantastic tool for competitor research because it has certain unique features that help you reveal your competitors’ SEO growth strategy. Here are the top features of Ahrefs:

• With the help of the ‘Also rank for’ search feature, you can find keywords that are high in search volume.
• It lets you study traffic breakdown by country. When you know that certain countries are pushing traffic to your competitors, then it becomes obvious which countries you need to better target.
• Ahrefs also lets you track the number of featured snippets your competitors own. Simply click on the SERP features section to learn more.

You can also use Ahrefs to find the domain authority and both old and new referring domains of your competition. This information is vital to help you find out how many links they’re earning each day compared to you. It will help you understand how deep you are in the water, and what you need to do about it.

You can even use it to monitor their organic keywords, traffic, and best-performing content. So long as you study the comprehensive reports generated by Ahrefs, you’ll have a competitive edge.

8) Woorank

Woorank is an SEO audit tool that’s perfect to help you understand the on- and off-page SEO of a site. The web-based tool will help you audit both your own and your competitors’ websites.

Use it to check which keywords your competition is targeting, their bounce rate, users, page views, and session durations. The tool also gives you week-to-to week reports so that you can track how your site is fairing against your competitors.

Further Reading:

• 12 Marketing Tools Guaranteed to Save You Time
• The Content Marketer’s Guide to Keyword Research
• The Power of Guest Blogging (And How to Get Started!)
• How to Conduct Smart Competitor Research for Better Customer Acquisition

9) SpyFu

As is apparent from the tool’s name, SpyFu is designed to help you spy on your competitors. When you type in your competitor’s domain, the tool reports on the keywords that they’ve bought on Google Adwords in the past.

You also have access to their organic search rankings and the variations of their ads. Information like how many clicks they earned, or how much they pay for each key phrase can prove very valuable.

You can also compare your performance against theirs and see how you stack up against them. Such information is a gold mine that will help you with your PPC campaigns.

10) Moz

Moz is a trusted SEO software that has its own set of competitive research tools. Here are the prominent features of Moz:

• It lets you track and compare the rankings of your website with that of your competitors.
• You can conduct a backlink gap analysis by clicking on the linking domains tab. This will help you see all the websites that are linking to your competitors but don’t link to you.

Avoid Analysis Paralysis

There’s a lot that you can do with these tools, but a word of caution: watch out for analysis paralysis, which is when you spend so much time on these tools that you end up doing nothing because you can live in the data all day and feel like you’re accomplishing something. Over-analyzing or over-thinking the data can lead to a situation in which no action is ever taken.

Here are some tips to avoid analysis paralysis while monitoring your competitors:

• Always identify your objectives so that you know what your end goal is.
• Keep the goals easily measurable and don’t chase perfection because in reality nothing is perfect.
• Avoid the trap of falling into too many options. Keep your options down and try to extract the maximum value out of them.
• Always set a time limit to complete a task.
• Don’t wait for the perfect beginning and don’t wait for the perfect end. Start at the earliest and end the analysis as soon as you get some actionable data. Remember, action needs to be taken fast.

Last Thoughts on These 10 Tools to Monitor Competitor Growth

As mentioned earlier, your competition is one of the biggest factors that influences your business. If you want to stay ahead of them, you need to know what they’re up to.

Now it’s up to you to figure out which of these tools can help you monitor your competitors. Building and improving your marketing efforts accordingly will help your business grow.

If you’re ready to level up your competitor research, Single Grain’s marketing experts can help!👇

Outsmart Competitors Now

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