Understanding Your Competition: 5 Competitor Website Comparison Tools

Let’s not lie, we all spy on our competitors and want to know how well they are doing, compared to us. But how can you do this effectively so that you can improve your own performance?

Analysing your competitors SEO, website content, social media and traffic is a great start in gaining some insight. Here are five tools we will explore in this blog that will allow you to understand your competitors that little bit more.

Moz SEO Tools

This tool allows you to analyse a variety of aspects against your competitors. By using the Keyword Explorer you can compare details of your root domain to your competitors. The first point to compare will be your website’s domain and page authority which will tell you how much Google rates the quality of the website. The other insights you can gain from this is keyword rankings, where you can find out how many and what keywords your competitors are currently ranking for, which ones you are both competing for and which position they are in for the different keywords.

By putting yours and your competitors website through the on demand crawl you can also find out if their website is using meta-descriptions, alt-tags, H1’s and other features that will all be affecting the website’s SEO technical score.

From here you can see what key SEO areas you may be lagging behind your competition in as well as see what keywords you should be focusing your content on to move ahead of your competition in Google’s rankings.

HubSpot’s Website Grader

This HubSpot Website Grader is a great for a quick overall glance of how you and your competitors websites are doing. By just entering the domain of the website you want to analyse you will find out if the website is mobile responsive, information on its performance, SEO and security level. The main way performance is measured is through analysing page size which in turn will give you your page speed and this then will contribute to your SEO score and therefore your rankings in Google, as this determines the experience the user gains which Google rates as a high priority as a factor that should be working well. The way this tool measures SEO is through looking to see if your website uses meta descriptions, H1 headings, alt-tags and a site map. Security will look to see if you have a SSL certificate. Compared to Moz this gives you all the analysis in one go and is a free tool whereas you would need to be on a paid version to run the few different actions you would need, to gain all the different information from Moz.  

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Buzzsumo’s content and social analysis

The content on your website is just as important to compare to your competition as the technical SEO formatting of your website. Gaining knowledge of your competitors content will tell you what's working well and what’s not. By using the Buzzsumo content analysis you will find out how many times your competitors publish new content and how many shares this content is getting.

You can also evaluate the social networks where this content is getting the most engagement, review who is sharing and linking to this content and what types of content your competitors are publishing. Therefore you can work out whether you should be posting more listicle blog posts or more how-to blog posts from the results your competitors have gained more engagement from.

Similarweb - traffic and sources

The Similarweb tool allows you to analyse the amount of traffic your competitors are getting to their website and the type of source this traffic is originating from. This tool gives you the insights into benchmarks within the industry and allows you to gage where you are against your competitors when it comes to traffic and what source is the most effective to drive the traffic to your site. It also gives you audience data from your competitors allowing you to  see where there is an overlap with your target market and the type of people your competitors are attracting to their website. Just because you see your competitors are producing content about a particular topic, if it doesn’t fit into the buyer personas you have defined for your business there’s no point in creating it. So always do your own research to make sure there is a need for the content you plan to create before allocating resources.

Semrush

This tool is great to do an overall competitor analysis, as it allows you to compare pretty much everything the other tools we have spoken about can. Therefore you can get an SEO comparison, social, content and traffic insight in one place. However, as Semrush doesn’t specialise in one particular area, it may not give as in-depth analysis as the other tools that focus on one aspect will.

When carrying out a competitor analysis we would recommend using a mixture of these tools and even comparing the results each of them give you and cross referencing these to make sure they align up together and one tool hasn’t picked up a outlier. Once you competitor analysis is completed it is a great platform to do your own website analysis and critical review what needs improving from the information you have gained from your competitor analysis.