Last Updated on May 25, 2023
Successfully growing your business requires tools capable of taking your business to the next level. This includes analytics tools that ensure your key marketing strategies are backed by reliable and up-to-date data on consumers, SEO management tools easily accessible by potential consumers, and competitive intelligence to keep you ahead of the game.
Why use SEO and competitive intelligence tools?
Tools that analyze your metrics and compare them to your competitors can offer valuable insight on whether to move forward with business decisions or change directions. Tracking and evaluating new market trends through social media and keyword research can help your business gain competitive advantage, especially when it comes to the market-entry or market defense of a product or service.
What are the best SEO and competitive intelligence tools on the market?
The leading tools in the industry that offer both SEO management and competitive intelligence worth looking into are MOz, SEMrush, and Ahrefs.
Moz is a pioneer in SEO (previously known as SEOmoz) having been around for 16 years. It started out as a blog and an online community where SEO experts collectively shared their knowledge and ideas. They grew to become a small consulting firm, and eventually to create some of the industry’s most reliable and comprehensive SEO tools. In addition to its tools, MOz also offers a wealth of SEO information online through their blog, guide and training & workshop programs.
MOz offers free tools as well as a paid premium service. Their free tools include Keyword Explorer, Link Explorer, Moz Bar, My Online Presence, Free Domain Analysis, and MozCast. MOz Pro, their subscription-based SEO tool is a comprehensive solution that offers services for crawling, keyword management, and webpage optimization.
- Keyword Explorer is used to perform a keyword and SERP analysis on your webpage. It can predict how much search volume a keyword will receive with 95% accuracy and generate a keyword list that best suits your website’s audience. Keyword Explorer also helps decipher your competitor’s most important keywords.
- MOz Pro Solutions is a tool used to find and fix technical SEO issues on your website. It automatically crawls and audits your pages weekly to find any broken redirects, missing title tags, or other issues that may be preventing your page from better indexing and achieving higher a ranking on SERPs.
- Link Explorer provides you with backlink research. It uses the industry’s most trusted link metrics to help you to learn why your page ranks where it is, and monitors inbound links. Link Explorer not only helps to increase the number of quality backlinks, it also looks into your competitor’s backlinks.
- SEMrush:
SEMrush on the other hand is an all-inclusive marketing tool with over 5 million users and 11 years of experience in the industry. It not only provides you with analytics on your consumers, it also assists with your SEO strategy and offers digital marketing services through their toolkits for PPC, social media, content marketing, and market research. These toolkits include reports and tools that are customizable to help you understand your campaign better.
SEMrush toolkit services:
- The SEO Toolkit lets you run a technical SEO audition on any site, track daily rankings, analyze competitor’s SEO strategy and research keyword ideas.
- The Advertising Toolkit features assistance for your PPC strategy by monitoring your competitor’s ad copies and landing pages, and analyzing their Google Shopping campaigns. The toolkit also offers services that include keywords: both finding keywords and optimizing negative keywords.
- The Social Media Toolkit can help create, launch, and manage advertising campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. You can see how your audience and engagement changes over time, learn and compare your competitor’s social media strategy, discover the best-performing posts, and schedule and post to 5 social networks.
- The Content Marketing Toolkit can help generate ideas for your specific audience by helping you discover the topics that will engage your audience, manage your editorial plan, provide you with a tailored template for SEO-friendly content, check and optimize content quality in real-time, track mentions and analyze your overall brand presence.
- The Competitive Research Toolkit ensures you’re staying on top of your competitors by allowing you to learn about any company’s web traffic and visitor engagement, discover your competitor’s best-performing marketing channels and identifying new opportunities and markets for your business to grow.
Ahrefs is one of the most used SEO tools on the market. Its easy-to-use and intuitive interface is preferred by those who aren’t SEO experts, and its full service features attract those who are. It’s a paid monthly tool that offers keyword research, SEO monitoring and position tracking, content-specific research, and competitive domain comparison.
- Site Audit helps your business to audit your on-page SEO performance in order to optimize your website’s ranking potential. It crawls your website’s pages, provides an overall score, flags issues and recommends ways to fix them.
- Site Explorer lets you analyze your competitor by looking into the backlink profile of any website or URL. This competitive intelligence tool provides you with organic traffic research to let you see the keywords your competitors are using, backlink checker to let you see which websites link to your competitor, and paid traffic research to let you gain insight on your competitor’s paid advertising strategy.
- Keywords Explorer keeps you up-to-date with keywords that are relevant to your customers. It runs the world’s largest third-party database of search inquiries with more than 7 billion keywords, updated every month.
- Content Explorer lets you find and analyze your industry’s top performing content. It also helps increase your backlinks by discovering broken links that needs to be fixed. Content Explorer will then recreate the dead page and ask those linking to it to link to you instead.
- Rank Tracker helps you to monitor your rankings and chart your performance against your competitor.
SEO Powersuite is another popular solution that offers a set of tools. It contains Rank Tracker, SEO SpyGlass, Website Auditor, Link Assistant within a package. It lets users enjoy all 4 tools with its free membership, however the capabilities are somewhat limited.
- Rank Tracker accurately ranks the data of your SEO campaign, analyzes your website alongside 10 of your competitors and lets you take advantage of its 18 built-in keyword suggestion tools.
- SEO SpyGlass audits your website and your competitor’s backlink strategies. This tool finds and neutralizes links that may be harmful by checking the quality of each link for things such as domain age and authority, anchor texts, and keywords.
- Website Auditor checks the health of your SEO by looking for structure and coding html flaws. Website Auditor fixes broken links, eliminate page loading problems, and fixes titles and descriptions. It also works to boost site indexation and crawling, optimizes page contents, and monitors metrics and traffic stats for each page.
- Link Assistant manages all your link data in one place. This tool is used to find link opportunities for your website, automatically verifies yours links, and generates link building reports.
If you are helping website for SEO in China, 5118 should not be missed out. It is one of the Chinese leading website crawler that improves onsite SEO. It crawls both small and large websites while allowing the user to analyse the results in real-time.
- Keywords Explorer audits the overall keywords of your website ranking on Baidu, 360, Shenma and Toutiao. It helps to identify other related keywords in order optimize your website’s ranking potential and recommended keywords for SEM purposes.
- Media Explorer analyzes your brand and competitors’ brand digital footprints in China. For instances PR release, articles, mini program ranking, assets and etc. This competitive intelligence tool provides you with great vision of competitors’ activities and potential strategies that could help your brand.
- Backlinks Explorer keeps you up-to-date with backlinks that are relevant to your website or competitors’ websites.
Aizhan is another leading SEO tool for China market. It is easy-to-use and provides actionable insights regarding search ranking and website traffic. Compared to 5118, Aizhan still has its own competitive advantages by having extra features. Namely website auditor, Whois checker, IP checker and ICP checker etc.
As knowledgeable and established as your company may be, there’s always something you can learn from your competitors. Whether that be practices worth emulating or mistakes to avoid, competitive intelligence is an important aspect in helping your business grow, especially when it comes to SEO strategy. Selecting the right tools is an important feat as it helps to keep your business on track with its goals.
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