Competitor Analysis is one of the core parts of the SEO Strategy. Analyzing your competitor’s data gives you a lot of visibility and answers a lot of questions.

You understand the difficulty of your niche, what strategy your competitors are using, what keywords are they targeting on, are they creating a lot of backlinks or just a few and a lot of information.

And this information helps you to create a vision, predict your traffic, and goal setups.

In this article, we will see what are the tools you can use to do competitor analysis and how to beat them in their own game.

Here are the 5 Best SEO Tools for Competitor Analysis

1. Ahrefs
2. Link Assistants Website Auditor
3. SimilarWeb
4. Ubersuggest
5. Googles Technical SEO Tools

We will divide these SEO tools among 3 Parts

1. Off Page SEO Tools
2. On Page SEO Tools
3. Technical SEO Tools

Let us first discuss the Off Page SEO Tools:

When it comes to Off-Page SEO, all we need to focus on is backlinks. Backlinks are one of the most important factors when it comes to SEO.

But building backlinks is a very challenging task.  And without tools, it gets even more difficult.

So to discover new backlinks opportunities the best way is to analyze the backlink portfolio of your competitors. And Ahrefs is the go-to tool for that.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is like all in one SEO tool. It is fully loaded with awesome features and worth the price.

The site explorer feature of Ahrefs can give you a lot of information about the competitor. You can check from which domains your competitor is building links.

Here is how I use Ahrefs Site Explorer:

1. Firstly I list out the top 5 competitors in my niche.
2. Then I put them in site explorer one by one.
3. Then I will check the root domains from where they have received backlinks.
4. I will choose only Dofollow links with the help of a filter.
5. And then I will download all the root domains with their URL Rating, Domain Rating, and Site Traffic.
6. I will do the same for all the competitors and add them into one sheet.
7. Then I will create a sheet which will give me visibility of which root domain has linked to the most number of competitors. You can download my sample competitor analysis sheet here.
8. The root domain which has linked to the most competitors will be my first priority and so on.

The alternative to Ahrefs is SEMrush, which pretty much does the same thing at a lower price. Also, you can buy the free trial version of SEMrush but Ahrefs does not provide the free version.

But I still prefer Ahrefs over SEMrush since it provides a better User Experience. Now that we are done with Off Page lets jump on OnPage SEO.

OnPage SEO is all about keyword and how we use it in the content. And there are so many awesome tools when it comes to OnPage SEO. Yoast SEO gives you a basic checklist for OnPage SEO. But here we will discuss some advanced OnPage SEO tools here.

Link Assistants Website Auditor

Website Auditor is a tool I use daily to SEO Optimise my article. It helps you to write SEO Friendly Article and also helps you with the Technical SEO.

It divides the report into two parts: Site Structure and Content Analysis. Content Analysis is something which you should use for optimizing your content and boost your OnPage SEO score.

In the Content Analysis report, there are two important parts: Page Audit and TF IDF Analysis.

Before starting the analysis, Website Auditor will ask you the keywords you want the page to rank for. And accordingly, it audits your page, analyses your content and provides you the best recommendations.

In Page Audit, it provides you a lot of Content optimization and Technical Factors. You can go through all of them and fix them one by one if there are any errors.

Here is the best feature of this tool: TF IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) Analysis. What it does is it analyses the content of the top 10 pages ranking for the keywords you provided. And then it compares their content with the content on your page.

After the comparison, it recommends you which terms you should use in your content and how many times you should use it. It also divides the terms into single-word keywords and multi-word keywords.

Adjust the keyword count according to the recommendations and your content will be perfectly optimized.

Another awesome tool to spy your competitor is SimilarWeb.

SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is the best tool to check the traffic of your competitor! SimilarWeb is almost accurate and it gives a lot of data in its free version.

It gives you the number of visitors on your competitor website in the last 6 months, Average visit duration, and Bounce Rate. It also provides you with Traffic data by countries, sources and a lot of important information.

We talked about Backlinks, Content, and Traffic. And now its time to talk about another most important SEO factor: Keywords!

UberSuggest or Ahrefs

Is there any tool which tells you for which keywords your competitor is ranking for? Well, there are two tools, one is Ahrefs which is premium and another is Ubersuggest by Neil Patel which is completely free!

Neil Patel is providing all the premium features for free on Ubersuggest. They are even going to provide competitors backlink portfolio soon.

So, if you are a complete newbie in SEO and does not have a budget then Ubersuggest is a go-to tool to check your competitor’s keywords. But if you can buy a premium tool and need more accurate data with awesome user experience, you should go ahead with Ahrefs.

Now that we have some backlinks and perfectly SEO optimized content, let’s discuss Technical SEO.

For technical SEO, Google itself provides a lot of tools.

Google’s Technical SEO Tools

Here are some best tools provided by Google to boost your Technical SEO score:

1. PageSpeed Insights
2. Mobile-Friendly Test
3. Web.Dev

PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights analyses your page and provides recommendation and suggestion to boost the speed of your page. You can analyze the page of your competitors and see where are they lagging behind.

Mobile Friendly Test

Mobile Friendly Test analyses your page and tells you whether your page will load on mobile properly or not.

Web.Dev

Web. Dev does the same thing as PageSpeed Insights but it also gives you some extra SEO Recommendations. So these were some of the best tools to analyze and spy your competitors and outrank them. Let me know in the comments which one is your favorite and if I missed any.