One way to know where your business stands is to look at the market and competition. You need to know what marketing strategies are developing others that target the same target audience as you, what traffic they have, or how they are positioning themselves.

So you’ll see what they’re doing right to make it even better, and what they’re doing wrong to take advantage of your brand.

But how do we do this analysis? You certainly need the help of tools “free or paid” to analyze the competition, with which you can extract relevant data, draw conclusions, and design a strategy.

What to do before using analysis tools?
Before you use any tool, you must detect your competitors, be clear about which data you need to know, and which variables are relevant to your business. From there you can start the analysis.

“Be thankful for quality competitors who push you to your limit.” — Michael Josephson

Start here

1. Find out who you compete with
Know which keywords define your business and then list the top ten competitors that come out in Google search for each of the keywords.

Another way is through Semrush. When you enter your domain, the tool will give you a chart of your competitors. So you can see what they do. for example, on social networks.

2. What information do you need?
You already know your online competition and you know which channels it is active in. Now you must be clear about which data are relevant:

The content they publish and which ones are most successful.
What tone they use.
Your digital reputation.
How do you optimize your content, do you invest in SEO?
Are you following an email marketing strategy?
Do you invest in advertising? What are your ads like?
Who is your leading online competitor?

3. Define the variables you want to know
For example, for the SEO strategy of competition, you can analyze some variables like the number of indexed pages in that domain, the keywords that are positioned in the first Google results, the load speed, the number of links they link to, or the backlinks.

The last step is to get those data together well and understand them. It’s no use writing numbers if you don’t make any conclusions. This is where the tools to analyze competition comes into play, which will help you understand your competitor’s success.

Tools to analyze the competition

I’ve collected the 10 best tools to analyze and spy on the competition.

These are the most popular ones, with which you will know some of the highlights of your competitors:

Moz
It is a free tool that allows you to know at a glance the domain authority of any website, the number of sites that link to you, or the number of keywords that are in the first 50 positions of Google.

Also, with Moz, you can compare your domain to another URL. That is, you can add your URL to analyze it and compare it to another one in your competition.

Similarweb
Is a free tool. It stands out for providing you with information about traffic on your website and that of your competition. It even gives you the option of installing a Google Chrome extension to view data while surfing the Web.

In addition to providing monthly visits, you can see other information such as the countries who more visit your site.

Semrush
It has a free, but limited version. It’s ideal for monitoring your competitors’ SEO strategy. With Semrush you can, among other things:

Know your competitor’s organic positioning.
Compare your domain to that of the competition and see which keywords you share and which you don’t. Know your competitor’s organic positioning.
Compare your domain to that of the competition and see which keywords you share and which you don’t.
Know the blogs best positioned in your sector and with which keywords have been positioned.
Learn about your competitors’ content strategy and see opportunities to position yourself above them.

Ubersuggest
By entering your domain of competence, you can analyze data about your SEO strategy.

But above all, it’s very useful to analyze a keyword, if you have searched, how difficult it is, to see who is at the top of that keyword, and to get ideas to improve that content. Ubersuggest has a free but limited version.

Pagespeed Insights
Pagespeed Insights is a free Google tool that is very useful for analyzing the load speed of a website.

Answer the public
It is very effective, but its free version is very basic. It is used to find the most precise searches that users perform on Google. In other words, Answer the public serves to guide you to structure your content and resolve users' most specific questions.

Facebook Ad Library
From this Facebook library, you can see what ads your competitors are launching and get ideas to do better.

Spyfu
Spyfu offers similar data to Semrush. With this tool, you can see Google Ads campaigns of the competition and keywords.

Mention
It allows real-time searches for mentions of your brand or competition, as well as keywords related to your business.

With Mention, you can monitor Internet content about your brand on forums, blogs, videos, images, etc.

Fanpagekarma
One of the tools to analyze competition on social networks is Fanpagekarma. It analyzes the social media profiles of the competition and yours to see the growth of fans and other relevant metrics.

The bottom line

The digital era gives us tools to explore what the competition is doing and how we can get ahead or at least not stay behind.

The reality is that is a time-consuming task since products and companies are popping up everywhere, but the most important way we can stay up to date is by watching current trends especially on social media.

Balance your time and delegate you can’t do it by yourself, trust your team.

“The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential… are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.” — Confucius