The Internet is a highly competitive place. In order to thrive, you must make some information public and expose yourself or you have no chance of success. The upside: your content and products can potentially be seen by millions. The downside: your competitors can see what you are doing and do it better. Or is this really a downside if you are the one analyzing your competition and eating their lunch?

What should you be looking for when you analyze your competition?

In short, you should be looking for every information that got them into this position. This means that you should be looking at the following.

On-page

• Page content: check how the content is structured, the titles used, the keyword focus, and the layout.
• Technical structure: look at how the page is built, how mobile-friendly it is, and the pagespeed.
• On-page SEO data: look how their URLs are built, the metadata used for search engines and social media,

Off-page

• Keywords: in order to understand a website’s success, you need to know which keywords they are positioned with in search engines and how they are positioned.
• Links: links play a big role in search engines rankings, find out who is linking to your competitors and whether you can get links from the same sources as well.
• Social media: get a grip on the positioning of your competitors in social media platforms. Which platforms are they using and which content is performing well.

The Tools

In order to get access to the data mentioned above, you can use the following tools. Some are redundant, but it’s only to give you a chance to find your personal favorite. A combination of two or three of these tools should give you a serious head start.

1. LocaliQ

For on-page SEO, LocaliQ is a great tool to help you understand what your competitors are doing right (or wrong). However, this tool may be best for improving your own website, even though it gives you the tools to compare with competing websites.

2. Website.grader

Another great website grader to get a quick look at the page performance of a competitor’s website. It gives you less information than LocaliQ, but it’s fast and well-presented to quickly understand what is well done and what not.

3. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is a personal favorite, as it gives precious information regarding the ranking of your competitors within the Internet, the country, and the industry (category). It gives you a rough idea on the statistics of the website, as well as information on traffic sources, keywords positioning, or social media presence. Some of the data is given out for free by the website, but you will need to pay to get all the interesting stats.

4. SpyFu

SpyFu is another tool to analyze your competitors, with a focus on keywords and SERP. On top of the keywords reports and other useful metrics, it includes some great tools for spying on your competitors marketing campaigns.

5. Majestic

Majestic is a SEO tool that will analyze plenty of data from your competitors with a more visual take on it, with a super useful graph explorer.

6. Owletter

Owletter is not about website monitoring, but about understanding what your competitors are doing with their email marketing. The tool captures all the emails sent by a website to their mailing list. It makes screenshots of the emails, stores it and analyzes it to help you understand what your competitors do.

Conclusion

Understanding your industry is important, knowing how it moves online, what it does marketing-wise, what keywords are important, who is linking, all this is crucial for your business’ success online. Tools will help you greatly, but you will have to put in the work in order to succeed, so get started now!