When it comes to your digital marketing strategy, understanding your competitor’s performance is half the battle. SEO is a zero-sum game, so the better your competitors are catching your audience, the worse you’re likely doing.
Optimizing your SEO can be a tricky thing according to the best SEO London agency. SEO takes months to build up and requires a deep understanding of SEO mechanics. However, it is something that any business can learn and should learn regardless of size or industry. Whether you’re looking to grow your online presence or expand your customer base, you will need to understand the competition. Here are some SEO tools you can use to understand your competition’s SEO.
1. Brand24 – Best for Brand Monitoring
While many digital marketing teams have a clear understanding of how their audience perceives them. Through the vast amount of analytics provided by many social media platforms and online services. The same understanding is not had for their competitors. Understanding how your competitor’s audience perceives them is a difficult thing to discover, but not impossible. With the use of media monitoring tools such as Brand24, digital marketing teams have a new weapon at their disposal.
A brief description of how media monitoring works would be useful here. In short, it is the process of monitoring online news and social media posts for mentions of a particular brand or topic. This can be done by setting up alerts that notify users when new content has been posted so they can respond in real-time or schedule posts ahead of time based on key words or phrases that are relevant to your business.
Brand24 allows SEO experts to track brand mentions and keywords across the internet. Through the Brand24 dashboard, digital marketing teams can monitor keyword results and segment and analyze them into actionable insights.
Through these insights, content creation teams can adjust their communications based on what is and is not working for the competition. Further, digital marketing teams can identify weaknesses and downwards trends for the competition and alter their marketing campaigns accordingly.
Brand24 costs $49/month for tracking three keywords. For more capabilities, content creation teams can pay $99/month to track seven keywords. Luckily, Brand24 offers a 14-day free trial to test out its capabilities.
2. Ahrefs – Best for PPC, SEO, & Content Marketing
When it comes to crafting an effective social media strategy, almost all digital marketing teams monitor organic search results and search traffic that generates revenue. When it comes to these capabilities, Ahrefs is one of the best programs out there. Ahref’s site explorer gives content creation teams a detailed look at paid search traffic and organic searches.
One of the best tools from Ahrefs is the content gap tool. This tool allows digital marketing teams to enter their domain name and see what keywords are being used by competitors and not by you. This tool quickly allows businesses to understand their own gaps, but also to understand their competitor’s gaps as well.
Ahrefs offers plenty of other SEO tools that allow users to understand both their own and their competitor’s SEO metrics. That is why Ahrefs is one of the best SEO tools on the market. Ahrefs has paid plans starting at $82/month but has many features that are free to use.
3. BuiltWith – Monitoring Tech Stacks
BuiltWith is a great tool for digital marketing teams who have a strong technical background. With BuiltWith, content creation teams can understand what types of technology different businesses are using on their websites.
For instance, SEO experts can look at a competitor’s website using BuiltWith and understand the types of payment systems, web servers, CDNs, and tracking pixels they are using. Since all of these items factor into a website’s SEO metrics, this can give digital marketing teams valuable insight into the gaps between their competitors on the technical side.
BuiltWith is free to use but offers paid plans starting at $246/month for more advanced capabilities. While the free plan offers most digital marketing teams all the information they need, for larger corporations and highly competitive industries, the paid plan will give you all the metrics any SEO expert could dream of.
4. Visualping – Determine Webpage Changes
The best London SEO specialists understand that tracking the competition is vital to beating out the competition. While many great generals have wished for the ability to see what’s going on behind enemy lines, Visualping offers that ability to SEO experts.
Visualping allows digital marketing teams the ability to understand website changes without having to manually track a competitor’s website for changes, which is nearly impossible. Visualping can analyze any website and monitor for changes in user experiences, conversion rate optimization tweaks, and other tiny changes that are otherwise impractical to track.
This level of insight lets companies understand the strategies that competitors are using to boost their SEO. This lets digital marketing teams analyze their competitor’s success and alter their own user experience to better resonate with their desired audience.
Visualping offers a free plan that allows users up to 65 checks a month. This is more than enough capability to analyze competitor homepages, trials, pricing, and more. However, for $11/month, users can get up to 1,200 checks along with other advanced capabilities.
5. SparkToro – Audience Insights
Any digital marketing team is likely knee-deep in market research to understand their industry and the competition. Collecting market research can be a daunting task for many content creation teams who are attempting to understand how to best reach their audience. However, with SparkToro, content creation teams can quickly understand how their competitors best engage their audience.
SparkToro allows users to plug in certain domains and social media accounts to determine the level of engagement and demographics of the people that domain or account reaches. With this level of data, digital marketing teams can identify which audiences engage with their content or their competitor’s content. This data can then be used to plug content gaps, identify advertising opportunities, and learn about which social media platforms work best for a particular audience.
SparkToro allows users five free searches per month with limited capabilities. However, paid plans start at $38/month for even more detailed reporting and a larger number of searches.
Knowledge is Half the Battle
Business is a zero-sum game, and in order for your business to stay on top, you must understand your competitors. Since so much of a business’s growth relies on SEO, social media, and digital marketing, having the tools to understand your competition’s digital marketing strategy is crucial. With these 5 tools, any business small or large can start understanding the market and improving their content creation strategies immediately.
