“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer”.

As a business, you should always follow this and keep a track of your competitors.

No matter what type of business you have or what industry you are in, there is always going to be competition. With such fierce competition, how do you gain a competitive advantage over them? One of the best ways to do this is to spy on your competitors to find out their marketing strategies.

Competitive analysis is an important aspect when creating your marketing strategy. You can achieve this by tracking your competitors’ search rankings, keywords they use, backlinks they have, social outreach, and anything else competitors use to amplify their business.

Use these Tools to Spy on your Competitors

1. Moz

Use Moz free tools for keyword research, link building & analysis, webpage performance, and local listings. You also get access to MozBar a web browser extension, which gives you instant metrics while viewing any page or SERP.

Find out how authoritative a site is in the eyes of search engines with Moz’s metrics Domain Authority (DA) & Page Authority (PA) with Mozbar.

2. SEMrush  

SEMrush is one of the most used tools in the industry. With tools on SEO, content marketing, competitor research, PPC, and social media marketing, attract and grow your business with Semrush.

Find your competitor’s backlinks and monitor changes in their ranking. Find their best performing organic keywords, top pages, top paid keywords, traffic stats

3. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an all-in-one toolset through which you can audit & explore sites, explore keywords & content. However, backlink analysis is Ahrefs biggest strength.

Get insights into your competitor’s backlink profile and find out referring domains and where these links are coming from. Also, check any URL’s top organic keywords and how much traffic a competitor receives on those keywords.

4. Sprout Social

Spy on your competitors’ social analytics with Sprout Social (previously Simply Measured). It gives a comprehensive overview of your competitors’ social media performance.

Evaluate and optimize your social strategy with rich data points you can track across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

5. Spyfu

Spyfu is a great tool to spy on your competitors with a solid free plan.

Enter your competitors’ domain to get an overview of their estimated SEO and PPC clicks, estimated ad budget, top organic and paid keywords, top pages, backlinks, and other useful data.

6. Similarweb

Get an in-depth analysis of your competitor’s website. Track your competitors’ monthly traffic, which channels bring the most visitors, and the different traffic sources.

Similarweb also provides insights into apps. Find out average monthly downloads and ratings, and you can also monitor its category rankings.

Conclusion

You need to know what marketing strategies your competitors are using to amplify their business so you can improve your own strategy.

It’s not just about copying your competitors’ strategies, it’s about learning what works and what doesn’t.

Use these tools to spy on your competitors to understand what strategies work for them and the changes you need to implement to compete and discover new business opportunities.

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