17 Best SEO Competitor Analysis Tools to Explore in 2023

Google made it essential for website owners and webmasters to boost a web page’s user experience by making page experience a key ranking factor or ranking signal. The new ranking signal makes it essential for you to measure the user experience of individual URLs using a slew of page experience metrics in 2023. You need to generate Web Core Vital reports to understand and measure a web page’s user experience based on real-world user data.

Also, you will use SEO audit tools regularly to boost a web page’s search visibility by identifying its strengths and working on its weaknesses. However, you cannot implement SEO strategies successfully in 2023 simply by working on your website’s weaknesses. In addition to identifying your website’s strengths and weaknesses, you need to assess the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. That is why; your SEO strategy must focus on both SEO audit and competitor analysis.

According to Indeed.com,

“A competitor analysis refers to an assessment of your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. This type of analysis helps you determine how your competitors compare to your own business. Essentially, it involves obtaining information about your company’s biggest competitors to improve your own business.”

In addition to identifying your strongest competitors, competitor analysis helps you to evaluate their SEO strategies and anticipate their future actions. You can easily curtail the time and efforts required to perform elaborate competitor analyzing many widely used SEO competitor analysis tools. Some of these online SEO competitive analysis tools can be accessed free of cost, while others are available as commercial or proprietary software. But every tool helps you to monitor and assess the SEO activities of your competitors efficiently and effortlessly.

17 SEO Competitor Analysis Tools to Understand and Beat Your Competitors in 2023

1) Ahrefs’s Site Explorer

This online tool is developed by Ahrefs with features to understand and analyze a website’s backlink profile and organic search traffic. Site Explorer helps you to analyze your competitor’s SEO activities using three tools – backlink checker, organic traffic research and paid traffic research. Hence, you can easily identify the keywords that make your competitors rank on SERPs and calculate the traffic your competitors get for specific keywords. At the same time, you can use the backlink checker to analyze your competitor’s backlink profile elaborately. However, you need to find your competitors before using Site Explorer.

2) Semrush’s Competitive Research Toolkit

You can use Competitive Research Toolkit to measure various digital marketing and advertisement campaigns run by your competitors. The toolkit analyses the SEO activities of your competitors using a slew of parameters – organic research, backlink analytics, keyword gap, and backlink gap. In addition to identifying your strongest competitors, you can use this toolkit to understand their keyword strategies, analyze their backlink profiles, and know their SEO best practices. Also, you can boost the performance of your SEO campaigns by identifying some of the keywords overlooked by you while conducting keyword research.

3) Searchmetrics

Searchmetrics allows you to avail of a variety of digital marketing solutions, including an SEO platform. The SEO platform helps you to boost your website’s site experience, search experience, and content experience by providing data-driven insights. It helps you to measure the search performance of your website and competitors’ websites based on keywords. You can use the online platform as an SEO competitor analysis tool to track your competitors across locations, regions, devices, search engines, and result types by leveraging machine learning (ML) algorithms. Also, you can generate data-driven reports to understand and analyze your competitor’s SEO activities.

4) iSpionage

iSpionage helps users to uncover their competitors’ conversion strategies by providing a slew of tools, including Competitor Research and Campaign Watch. While making SEO strategies, you can use the Competitor Research tool to identify the profitable keywords used by your competitors based on data collected from three search engines Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Also, it helps you to boost SEO campaigns by adding new SEO terms and finding new profitable keywords. At the same time, you can use the SEO Watch tool to analyze your competitors’ SEO activities and know the best practices they adopt to increase organic website traffic.

5) SpyFu’s SEO Competitor Analysis

SpyFu helps users to conduct keyword research, SEO research, and PPC research by providing a slew of premium online software solutions. You can leverage the SEO Competitor Tool developed by SpyFu to identify your competitors as well as analyze their SEO strategies. This tool helps you to monitor the domains that have been gaining on your targeted keywords, measure the performance of competing keywords based on the number of clicks, and emulate your competitor’s content and keywords. At the same time, you can leverage the tool to monitor and understand the impact of search algorithm changes on these competing domains.

6) SimilarWeb’s Competitive Intelligence Analysis Tools

The online tools provided by SimilarWeb help you to compare your website or domain against the market based on both traffic and key engagement metrics. You can use Competitive Intelligence Analysis Tools developed by SimilarWeb to uncover and analyze the SEO and content strategies of your competitors. These tools help you to perform SEO competitor analysis by reviewing the traffic share of every targeted keyword across search type, geography, and competitiveness. Also, you can leverage the tools to create more SEO-friendly content by emulating the most-viewed content on competitor websites and adopting trending keywords.

7) SERPstat

The all-in-one SEO platform launched by SERPstat helps you to avail of tools to simplify a wide range of SEO activities – keyword analysis, competitor analysis, rank checking, site audit, on-page audit, and backlink analysis. You can use the keyword research tool to pick and use the most relevant keywords collected based on competitor websites in your niche. At the same time, you can use the competitor analysis tool to identify your strongest competitors as well as track and their website traffic and domain visibility. Also, you can strengthen your SEO strategies by finding the best keywords and top-ranking pages of your competitors.

8) Alexa

Alexa is developed as an SEO and competitive analysis software solution. You can use Alexa to compare your website with competitors as well as see your competitors’ keywords. When you choose competitive website analysis, Alexa will help you to find your top competitors and compare your competitors’ content, keywords, and backlinks. Also, you can boost your SEO campaigns by analyzing the benchmark website performance of your competitors. At the same time, you can choose keyword research to find competitor keywords, buyer keywords, and easy-to-rank keywords at once.

9) Rank Signal

Despite being one of the popular SEO competitor analysis tools, Rank Signal is developed as a backlink checker tool. While performing SEO competitor analysis, you can use this free online solution to reverse engineer the backlink sources of your competitors. You can identify and evaluate your competitor’s best links simply by entering the website or domain name. Also, you can review and analyze a competitor’s backlink profile using a slew of quality metrics – traffic rank, domain rank, and internal and external links.

10) Monitorbacklinks

The premium SEO solution helps you to check both the good backlinks and bad backlinks of your competitors. You can use Monitorbacklinks to track your website’s search performance based on targeted keywords as well as build valuable backlinks. At the same time, you can use this online tool to see the keywords and backlinks of your competitors by reverse engineering their SEO strategies. Also, the tool helps you to keep your website’s search performance intact by defending against the negative SEO campaigns launched by your competitors.

11) Brightedge

The Brightedge platform allows you to use a slew of digital marketing products and solutions. You can use some of these online solutions to beat your competitors by discovering what customers are searching for early and proactively. The tool helps you to identify the competitors that rank higher on SERPs for specific content topics. Also, you can use the same tool to measure the performance of the content and keywords used in various SEO campaigns against your competitors. Many digital marketers these days prefer Brightedge to other popular competitor analysis tools to boost SEO campaigns by optimizing both content and keywords.

12) SE Ranking

This all-in-one SEO software comes with tools to automate SEO activities and perform competitive analysis. The competitive research feature of SE Ranking helps you to get a 360⁰ view of the organic and paid promotion strategies of your competitor simply by entering a domain or URL. In addition to identifying your top competitors based on targeted keywords, you can use SE Ranking to analyze a competitor’s SEO strategy using a slew of parameters – keywords, popular content, website traffic, and backlinks. Also, you can measure each of these metrics in a simple and straightforward way.

13) SeoClarity

This all-in-one SEO platform allows you to choose from a slew of online SEO tools and services, including Competitive Insights. You can use the premium tool to identify your top competitors as well as get a clear view of the competition. The tool uses deep competitor intelligence to discover opportunities to make your website rank higher on SERPs. You can use the tool to find top-ranking websites based on targeted keywords. Also, you can analyze the competitors’ top-ranking keywords using keywords, content, and links. You can even boost your website’s search visibility by identifying and bridging the content gap.

14) Raven Tools

Raven is developed with a slew of SEO tools and services. It simplifies SEO competitor analysis by providing a competitor analysis tool. The competitor analysis tool identifies and evaluates your competitor domains using over 20 data points gathered from multiple SEO data sources. You can use the tool to know how and why your competitors are ranking higher for targeted keywords. You can boost your SEO strategy by spying on your competitors, emulating their winning strategies, and finding new backlink opportunities. At the same time, the tool makes it easier for you to compare your website with competitors using site metrics, social metrics, and SEO metrics.

15) Link Explorer

The free SEO tool is developed by Moz as a backlink checker. But Link Explorer simplifies SEO competitor analysis by providing a slew of valuable information about competitors – page authority, domain authority, and backlink profiles.  While performing SEO competitive analysis, you can use Link Explorers to review inbound links to competitor websites, access competitors’ link profiles, identify competitors’ top-performing content, and discover link-building opportunities. You can access competitor information simply by entering a specific website or domain. But you can access Link Explorer only through your Moz account.

16) Crayon

Crayon is developed as a competitive analysis platform. It helps you a 360-degree view of your competitors by enabling software-driven competitive intelligence tracking. You can use Crayon to track the digital footprint of top competitors from many sources – websites, social media, mobile apps, and review sites. Also, you can leverage the online solution to automate the process of researching and analyzing your competitors based on intelligence collected from over 300 million sources.

17) WhatRunsWhere

This popular online platform helps you to inform and fine-tune your digital marketing strategies by identifying the winning campaigns run by your competitors. In addition to featuring sophisticated ad spying tools, WhatRunsWhere helps you to find advertisers and websites as well as see their campaigns elaborately. You can use this solution to track competitors’ traffic sources and landing pages based on real-time data. In addition to analyzing the SEO strategies that help your competitors to increase organic website traffic regularly, you can use WhatRunsWhere to identify the text and images that convert website visitors into customers.

You can understand, monitor, and analyze your competitors’ SEO strategies and activities using a slew of SEO competitor analysis tools. But you must remember that these widely used SEO competitive analysis tools differ from each other in several aspects, including features and cost. That is why; you should spend some time comparing these free and commercial online SEO competitor analysis tools to strengthen your SEO strategies in 2023.