These are the 3 free tools to analyze your competitor’s online performance;
- Google: Find competitors
- Ubersuggest: Dive into competitor’s details
- VisualPing: Track changes on your competitor’s website
1. Google
Listing Google as a tool might seem a bit off, but it is the best tool to understand your competition. Let us explain.
A simple search will tell you who your main competitors are.
And what SEO strategies are successful for them.
Using SERP features to understand your competitor’s strategy
The layout of the Search Result Page (SERP) can change based on what your are searching for, and will show the SERP features that fit the search intent best. Ads, Product Carousel, ‘People Also Ask’ and the ‘3-pack’ (local businesses and a Google map) are some of the most common SERP features.
After you did a search, look at the full SERP for a minute.
Shopping Carousel
Are your competitors showing up in the free product/shopping carousel? This means they are using Google Merchant Center to feed their products to Google.
People Also Ask
Is your competitor’s website listed among the ‘People Also Ask’ questions and answers? This means they target the informational intent keywords and know how to optimize their copy.
Local 3-Pack
Are you seeing your competitors’ business in the local 3-pack? This will tell you they probably have a local SEO strategy in place.
Sponsored Results
Do you see ‘sponsored’ results from your competitors? This means they have an advertising budget. Ask yourself why they are promoting certain products.
2. Ubersuggest
Where Google tells you who the competitors are, and what SEO strategies they might be using, Ubersuggest allows you to dive deeper into a specific competitor.
Competitor’s organic traffic and top keywords
Go to Ubersuggest, set the country to the United Arab Emirates, and enter the URL of the competitor you want to analyze. (After your first search Ubersuggest will ask you to create an account. This is free and you can continue using the free version with the limited data.)
And there you go.. your competitor’s monthly organic traffic is above 6,000 visitors a month.
Their top keyword is.. caviar 🙂
And their most popular pages:
3. VisualPing
Ok, so now that we know who the competitors are and how they perform online, we can take our analysis even further with VisualPing.
Let’s say there is this one product you and your competitor are selling. And you want to make sure you always offer the best price. You can set Visualping to monitor the competitor’s pricing, and send out an alert when the pricing changes. This will allow you to automate the monitoring, and respond to the updated pricing instantly.
Here’s a how to set up a monitoring ‘job’.
Monitor your competitor’s pages
Create a free account and set up your page alerts by creating a ‘job’.
Use the URL of the page you want to monitor, give the job name, set the frequency and how big of a change you are looking for.
Then you can choose how you want the tool to monitor the changes; visual, text or element. You might need to play around with these settings a little to get to the anticipated result.
Don’t forget to ‘create the job’ to finish the setup. After this, you are good to go!
The tool also allows a few more advanced settings, but for now, setting up a job should be sufficient to start monitoring your competitor.
Note: if a website uses popups for new users, then setting up VisualPing might become a little tricky. Some basic developer skills will come in handy to get around this. The ‘perform actions’ menu can help you with this.
Other tools to analyze the competition
There are many other tools that allow you to monitor your competitors. And most of them have an overlap in what data they provide. Each has their pros and cons to consider, and excels in different areas. Therefore at Rankability we like to use all of them 🙂
These are the industry go-to tools in many cases. Note, that these are not free, but all do offer some free tools and/or trials for you to try.
- SEMRush: keyword research, traffic overview, backlink analytics, competitor tracking
- Ahref: keyword research, competitor research, rank tracker, SERP comparison
- SEO PowerSuite: rank tracker, website audit, link building
- MOZ Pro: rank tracking, site crawls, page optimization score, link building
- BuzzSumo: content discovery, competitor analysis, monitor mentions, find influencers
To Wrap Up
With these free tools, you can start monitoring your competitors today. And use your findings to fine-tune your strategy.
Will this tell you everything you need to know? No. But these tools do offer a good start with actionable insights. For free. If you want to dive deeper you can always consider subscribing to a paid tool. Or start working with a Digital Marketing agency.
Don’t want to do everything yourself? Get a Free Consult!
Do you want to know if you are over- or under-performing compared to your direct competitors? Contact us and talk to our Market Analysis specialists. A first consult is always free. No strings attached!
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Image credits
Semrush.com
Screenshots taken by the author
