SEO

5 Competitor Analysis Tools You Should Be Using

Published

2 years ago

January 13, 2022

5 Competitor Analysis Tools You Should Be Using

It probably feels as if you need tens of marketing tools to get a complete picture of the competitor landscape. I’ve certainly tried too many of them throughout my career.

But the truth is just a few right tools will cover most of your competitor analysis needs. And they don’t need to break the bank. In fact, some of the most powerful ones are free.

In this article, we’ll go through five competitor analysis tools you should be using:

Ahrefs – SEO, PPC, and content marketing
Brand24 – Brand monitoring
SparkToro – Audience insight
BuiltWith – Tech stack checker
Visualping – Webpage monitoring

Let’s get into them.

Most companies consider organic and paid search traffic to be some of their most important traffic sources. Having reliable and insightful data about what your competitors do in this space is crucial—and that’s where Ahrefs comes into play.

Ahrefs provides data about your competitors’ content, backlinks, keywords, PPC ads, and much more. With its help, you can develop an SEO, PPC, and content marketing strategy to outsmart your competition.

My favorite functionality: Finding content gaps between you and your competitors

Ahrefs’ Site Explorer provides an in-depth look at both organic and paid search traffic, including backlinks of any website. There are lots of use cases for competitor analysis, so I’ll just explain my favorite feature: Ahrefs’ Content Gap tool.

It shows keywords for which your competitors rank, but you don’t. These content gaps can quickly give you many new ideas for your content planning.

In Site Explorer, enter your own domain and then click “Content gap.” Your domain will automatically be prefilled in the “But the following target doesn’t rank for” field. All that’s left now is to list a few domains that are your organic traffic competitors:

Text field for competitors. Below that is text field for your domain

Hit “Show keywords”:

List of keywords and corresponding data (volume, KD, CPC, SERP)

You’ll get a huge list of keywords. Now it’s all about playing with the provided filters.

To increase relevance, let’s choose the option where at least two competitor websites rank for every keyword. You can do so by selecting it in the intersection filter. Then filter for the best keyword opportunities by setting a minimal search volume and relatively low maximum KD score:

I’m certain you’ll find some great keyword opportunities this way.

Pricing

Free to see technical SEO recommendations and backlinks to the websites you own using Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.

For competitor analysis tools and features, you’ll need a paid plan starting at $82 a month. There’s also a seven-day trial for $7.

Check out Ahrefs here.

Using social media as a communication channel is a must for the vast majority of companies. But seeing what your competitors do and how their audience perceives them across a huge variety of platforms isn’t something you can easily do by yourself. But no worries. Media monitoring tools, like Brand24, have got this covered.

Brand24 tracks mentions of keywords that you want to monitor across the whole web with a focus on social media. For competitor analysis, it’s used to identify and analyze online conversations around your competitors’ brands and products.

My favorite functionality: Spying on competitors’ brand mentions

Brand24 revolves around setting up a project with keywords you want to track. These keyword mentions can then be segmented, filtered, and analyzed to gain actionable insights. You’ll definitely want to track your own brand and product mentions. But we’re here to talk about your competitors.

So set up a separate project (or projects) with the name of competitor brands and products. You’ll encounter keywords that also have other meanings. You can either leave them out or apply the required and excluded keyword filters along the way to keep the irrelevant ones out of your reports:

Project settings to add main keyword, add/remove other keywords

This competitor mentions monitoring allows you to:

Adjust your communication based on what works best in your industry.
Get product insights based on how people react to the development of your competitors’ products.
Assess how people perceive your brand and your competitors via sentiment analysis.
Benchmark your media reach and share of voice against your competitors.

I’m sure there are even more use cases. Here’s an example of data from a summary dashboard:

Summary data above. Below that are line graphs showing mentions and social media reach, respectively

Pricing

Plans start at $49 a month for tracking three keywords. Tracking your brand and your competitors will require a higher plan for $99 a month that offers seven keywords.

Brand24 also offers a 14-day free trial.

Check out Brand24 here.

Doing market research to understand your audience is essential for your marketing success. Chances are, the research also contains competitive analysis data like brand perceptions, estimations of competitors’ marketing funnels, and market shares across segments. Those are all great.

But seeing what the audience of your competitors actually does on the internet is a rather new thing that tools like SparkToro allow us to get in seconds.

SparkToro is an audience research tool that provides information about what any audience reads, watches, listens to, and follows. Those insights can be retrieved based on keywords, social media accounts, websites, or hashtags. Needless to say, all of those inputs can be used to better understand your competitors’ audience.

My favorite functionality: Discovering where competitors’ audience engages

SparkToro is easy to use and navigate. Let’s do an example analysis on the SparkToro audience itself by plugging in its Twitter profile:

It will return a lot of data regarding the demographics of the audience. But in this case, we’ll focus on social media accounts, websites, podcasts, and YouTube channels the audience follows and pays attention to. Here’s an example of a report after filtering for personal social media accounts with fewer than 50K followers:

List of social media accounts with corresponding data (percent of audience, SparkScore, social followers)

With data like this, you can easily spot new advertising and sponsorship opportunities across many different channels. Just put together all the insights by plugging in your competitors’ social profiles, websites, keywords, and any “owned” hashtags.

Price

SparkToro is free for five searches a month with limited report capabilities. Paid plans start at $38 a month.

Check out SparkToro here.

Today’s marketing heavily relies on all sorts of tracking codes, pixels, and using the right technologies in the background. Some areas of marketing like SEO are even directly intertwined with website development. Choosing the right tech stack can often be the first step to success.

BuiltWith is a tool that puts together all detectable technologies any website is using, e.g., tracking pixels, payment systems, web servers, and CDNs. You can create a picture of tech stacks your competitors are using. Then either take inspiration from it or choose superior solutions.

My favorite functionality: Checking advertising technologies

BuiltWith is the easiest and most straightforward tool to use on this list. Just look up websites of your competitors and take notes of any technology that stands out.

For marketing purposes, you can quickly scan all of their detectable marketing technologies. Since most advertising platforms use tracking codes and pixels for remarketing, analytics, and attribution purposes, you’ll see which platforms your competitors are present on.

Finding out that your competitors use Google, Facebook, and Twitter ads isn’t a surprise for anyone, though. But you can find some niche platforms or display networks that may be worth looking into. Here’s an example of what BuiltWith can reveal in its “Analytics and Tracking” section:

List of websites. Below each are links to see stats and download list of websites that use the site

Pricing

BuiltWith is free for the use case I depicted above. I’ve never felt the need to consider its paid plans, which start at $246 a month. Those plans seem to go way beyond the basic functionality and may be worth it for businesses that need a deeper dive into what tech stacks their target audience and prospects use.

Check out BuiltWith here.

Website design and copywriting convey tons of information. They’re also constantly in development, testing, and changing. And whether you admit it or not, every website takes a bit (or a lot) of inspiration from competitors and other websites in the industry. You need to know what’s going on in this area.

Visualping is a tool that keeps track of changes on any webpage. You plug in a competitor’s URL, set up alerts, and will be updated on any website changes.

My favorite functionality: Getting inspired by UX and CRO tweaks on competitors’ websites

I’ve made a lot of decisions based on website monitoring. Generally, the most common use case for any marketer is getting inspired by how your competitors try to squeeze more out of every visitor to their website.

In other words, we’re looking for user experience (UX) and conversion rate optimization (CRO) tweaks that we can adopt on our website without having to do all the research and A/B testing.

All you need to do is to set up the tracking of your competitors’ websites, and you’ll get alerted whenever there is any noteworthy change. For this use, it’s enough to set up the checking frequency to occur daily or even weekly.

You can also opt in for “any change” or “tiny changes,” as those tweaks can range from small changes in copy to just changing CTA button positions and colors:

On left side is website that you want to track changes. On the right, job settings to tailor preferences

Keep in mind that you shouldn’t blindly copy whatever your competitors do. Those changes may be for the worse. Ideally, the change has to make sense for you, and you should know that the competitor does A/B testing (checking with BuiltWith is a good start).

Pricing

Visualping offers a free plan with up to 65 checks a month, which would probably be enough to cover the homepage, pricing, trial, and other important pages of your competitors on a weekly basis.

If you’re more serious about keeping track of your competitors’ websites, then do try out the paid plans. Those start at $11 a month for 1,200 checks. “Price per page” checks naturally get cheaper as you scale up the monitoring.

Check out Visualping here.

Final thoughts

You may be wondering: “So this is it? Just five tools to get a complete picture of the competitive landscape?”

Well, yes and no.

I only covered the essential tools that everyone can and should use without breaking the bank. I deliberately didn’t list tools that have a niche use (e.g., analyzing YouTube or mobile app landscape). I also avoided “overkill” marketing intelligence platforms like SimilarWeb that provide tons of competitive data but mainly target enterprise and agency customers.

Also, keep in mind the tools I listed here are the ones I have experience with and like the most. Almost every tool has a solid alternative that you may like more.

With this out of the way, I also want to highlight a few more competitive analysis resources (not necessarily tools) that are super helpful and mainly free:

Financial reports of public companies to access a goldmine of firsthand information about your competitors
Surveys and focus groups to get quantitative and qualitative data about your market and competitors
Ghost shopping to get direct customer experiences from your competitors and possibly uncover their sales tactics
Review platforms like G2, TrustPilot, Yelp, or Google My Business to check what your competitors’ customers say

So that’s it. If you’re just finding out about the tools and are not sure what is the right way to conduct the competitive analysis, we also have a simple guide (including a template).

Got a tool that I should mention here? Or just a question? Ping me on Twitter.

Related Topics:analysis competitor Tools

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SEO

How To Write ChatGPT Prompts To Get The Best Results

Published

14 hours ago

April 24, 2024

Max

How To Write ChatGPT Prompts To Get The Best Results

ChatGPT is a game changer in the field of SEO. This powerful language model can generate human-like content, making it an invaluable tool for SEO professionals.

However, the prompts you provide largely determine the quality of the output.

To unlock the full potential of ChatGPT and create content that resonates with your audience and search engines, writing effective prompts is crucial.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the art of writing prompts for ChatGPT, covering everything from basic techniques to advanced strategies for layering prompts and generating high-quality, SEO-friendly content.

Writing Prompts For ChatGPT

What Is A ChatGPT Prompt?

A ChatGPT prompt is an instruction or discussion topic a user provides for the ChatGPT AI model to respond to.

The prompt can be a question, statement, or any other stimulus to spark creativity, reflection, or engagement.

Users can use the prompt to generate ideas, share their thoughts, or start a conversation.

ChatGPT prompts are designed to be open-ended and can be customized based on the user’s preferences and interests.

How To Write Prompts For ChatGPT

Start by giving ChatGPT a writing prompt, such as, “Write a short story about a person who discovers they have a superpower.”

ChatGPT will then generate a response based on your prompt. Depending on the prompt’s complexity and the level of detail you requested, the answer may be a few sentences or several paragraphs long.

Use the ChatGPT-generated response as a starting point for your writing. You can take the ideas and concepts presented in the answer and expand upon them, adding your own unique spin to the story.

If you want to generate additional ideas, try asking ChatGPT follow-up questions related to your original prompt.

For example, you could ask, “What challenges might the person face in exploring their newfound superpower?” Or, “How might the person’s relationships with others be affected by their superpower?”

Remember that ChatGPT’s answers are generated by artificial intelligence and may not always be perfect or exactly what you want.

However, they can still be a great source of inspiration and help you start writing.

Must-Have GPTs Assistant

I recommend installing the WebBrowser Assistant created by the OpenAI Team. This tool allows you to add relevant Bing results to your ChatGPT prompts.

This assistant adds the first web results to your ChatGPT prompts for more accurate and up-to-date conversations.

It is very easy to install in only two clicks. (Click on Start Chat.)

Screenshot from ChatGPT, April 2024

For example, if I ask, “Who is Vincent Terrasi?,” ChatGPT has no answer.

With WebBrower Assistant, the assistant creates a new prompt with the first Bing results, and now ChatGPT knows who Vincent Terrasi is.

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

You can test other GPT assistants available in the GPTs search engine if you want to use Google results.

Master Reverse Prompt Engineering

ChatGPT can be an excellent tool for reverse engineering prompts because it generates natural and engaging responses to any given input.

By analyzing the prompts generated by ChatGPT, it is possible to gain insight into the model’s underlying thought processes and decision-making strategies.

One key benefit of using ChatGPT to reverse engineer prompts is that the model is highly transparent in its decision-making.

This means that the reasoning and logic behind each response can be traced, making it easier to understand how the model arrives at its conclusions.

Once you’ve done this a few times for different types of content, you’ll gain insight into crafting more effective prompts.

Prepare Your ChatGPT For Generating Prompts

First, activate the reverse prompt engineering.

Type the following prompt: “Enable Reverse Prompt Engineering? By Reverse Prompt Engineering I mean creating a prompt from a given text.”

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

ChatGPT is now ready to generate your prompt. You can test the product description in a new chatbot session and evaluate the generated prompt.

Type: “Create a very technical reverse prompt engineering template for a product description about iPhone 11.”

Reverse Prompt engineering via WebChatGPT

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

The result is amazing. You can test with a full text that you want to reproduce. Here is an example of a prompt for selling a Kindle on Amazon.

Type: “Reverse Prompt engineer the following {product), capture the writing style and the length of the text :
product =”

Reverse prompt engineering: Amazon product

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

I tested it on an SEJ blog post. Enjoy the analysis – it is excellent.

Type: “Reverse Prompt engineer the following {text}, capture the tone and writing style of the {text} to include in the prompt :
text = all text coming from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-bard-training-data/478941/”

Reverse prompt engineering an SEJ blog post

Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023

But be careful not to use ChatGPT to generate your texts. It is just a personal assistant.

Go Deeper

Prompts and examples for SEO:

Keyword research and content ideas prompt: “Provide a list of 20 long-tail keyword ideas related to ‘local SEO strategies’ along with brief content topic descriptions for each keyword.”
Optimizing content for featured snippets prompt: “Write a 40-50 word paragraph optimized for the query ‘what is the featured snippet in Google search’ that could potentially earn the featured snippet.”
Creating meta descriptions prompt: “Draft a compelling meta description for the following blog post title: ’10 Technical SEO Factors You Can’t Ignore in 2024′.”

Important Considerations:

Always Fact-Check: While ChatGPT can be a helpful tool, it’s crucial to remember that it may generate inaccurate or fabricated information. Always verify any facts, statistics, or quotes generated by ChatGPT before incorporating them into your content.
Maintain Control and Creativity: Use ChatGPT as a tool to assist your writing, not replace it. Don’t rely on it to do your thinking or create content from scratch. Your unique perspective and creativity are essential for producing high-quality, engaging content.
Iteration is Key: Refine and revise the outputs generated by ChatGPT to ensure they align with your voice, style, and intended message.

Additional Prompts for Rewording and SEO:
– Rewrite this sentence to be more concise and impactful.
– Suggest alternative phrasing for this section to improve clarity.
– Identify opportunities to incorporate relevant internal and external links.
– Analyze the keyword density and suggest improvements for better SEO.

Remember, while ChatGPT can be a valuable tool, it’s essential to use it responsibly and maintain control over your content creation process.

Experiment And Refine Your Prompting Techniques

Writing effective prompts for ChatGPT is an essential skill for any SEO professional who wants to harness the power of AI-generated content.

Hopefully, the insights and examples shared in this article can inspire you and help guide you to crafting stronger prompts that yield high-quality content.

Remember to experiment with layering prompts, iterating on the output, and continually refining your prompting techniques.

This will help you stay ahead of the curve in the ever-changing world of SEO.

More resources:

Featured Image: Tapati Rinchumrus/Shutterstock

SEO

Measuring Content Impact Across The Customer Journey

Published

1 day ago

April 23, 2024

Max

Measuring Content Impact Across The Customer Journey

Understanding the impact of your content at every touchpoint of the customer journey is essential – but that’s easier said than done. From attracting potential leads to nurturing them into loyal customers, there are many touchpoints to look into.

So how do you identify and take advantage of these opportunities for growth?

Watch this on-demand webinar and learn a comprehensive approach for measuring the value of your content initiatives, so you can optimize resource allocation for maximum impact.

You’ll learn:

Fresh methods for measuring your content’s impact.
Fascinating insights using first-touch attribution, and how it differs from the usual last-touch perspective.
Ways to persuade decision-makers to invest in more content by showcasing its value convincingly.

With Bill Franklin and Oliver Tani of DAC Group, we unravel the nuances of attribution modeling, emphasizing the significance of layering first-touch and last-touch attribution within your measurement strategy.

Check out these insights to help you craft compelling content tailored to each stage, using an approach rooted in first-hand experience to ensure your content resonates.

Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or new to content measurement, this webinar promises valuable insights and actionable tactics to elevate your SEO game and optimize your content initiatives for success.

View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.

SEO

How to Find and Use Competitor Keywords

Published

2 days ago

April 23, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

Competitor keywords are the keywords your rivals rank for in Google’s search results. They may rank organically or pay for Google Ads to rank in the paid results.

Knowing your competitors’ keywords is the easiest form of keyword research. If your competitors rank for or target particular keywords, it might be worth it for you to target them, too.

There is no way to see your competitors’ keywords without a tool like Ahrefs, which has a database of keywords and the sites that rank for them. As far as we know, Ahrefs has the biggest database of these keywords.

How to find all the keywords your competitor ranks for

Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
Enter your competitor’s domain
Go to the Organic keywords report

The report is sorted by traffic to show you the keywords sending your competitor the most visits. For example, Mailchimp gets most of its organic traffic from the keyword “mailchimp.”

Since you’re unlikely to rank for your competitor’s brand, you might want to exclude branded keywords from the report. You can do this by adding a Keyword > Doesn’t contain filter. In this example, we’ll filter out keywords containing “mailchimp” or any potential misspellings:

Filtering out branded keywords in Organic keywords report

If you’re a new brand competing with one that’s established, you might also want to look for popular low-difficulty keywords. You can do this by setting the Volume filter to a minimum of 500 and the KD filter to a maximum of 10.

Finding popular, low-difficulty keywords in Organic keywords

How to find keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t

Go to Competitive Analysis
Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
Enter your competitor’s domain in the But these competitors do section

Hit “Show keyword opportunities,” and you’ll see all the keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t.

You can also add a Volume and KD filter to find popular, low-difficulty keywords in this report.

How to find keywords multiple competitors rank for, but you don’t

Go to Competitive Analysis
Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
Enter the domains of multiple competitors in the But these competitors do section

Competitive analysis report with multiple competitors

You’ll see all the keywords that at least one of these competitors ranks for, but you don’t.

Content gap report with multiple competitors

You can also narrow the list down to keywords that all competitors rank for. Click on the Competitors’ positions filter and choose All 3 competitors:

Selecting all 3 competitors to see keywords all 3 competitors rank for

Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
Enter your competitor’s domain
Go to the Paid keywords report

This report shows you the keywords your competitors are targeting via Google Ads.

Since your competitor is paying for traffic from these keywords, it may indicate that they’re profitable for them—and could be for you, too.

You know what keywords your competitors are ranking for or bidding on. But what do you do with them? There are basically three options.

1. Create pages to target these keywords

You can only rank for keywords if you have content about them. So, the most straightforward thing you can do for competitors’ keywords you want to rank for is to create pages to target them.

However, before you do this, it’s worth clustering your competitor’s keywords by Parent Topic. This will group keywords that mean the same or similar things so you can target them all with one page.

Here’s how to do that:

Export your competitor’s keywords, either from the Organic Keywords or Content Gap report

Paste them into Keywords Explorer
Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab

For example, MailChimp ranks for keywords like “what is digital marketing” and “digital marketing definition.” These and many others get clustered under the Parent Topic of “digital marketing” because people searching for them are all looking for the same thing: a definition of digital marketing. You only need to create one page to potentially rank for all these keywords.

Keywords under the cluster of "digital marketing"

2. Optimize existing content by filling subtopics

You don’t always need to create new content to rank for competitors’ keywords. Sometimes, you can optimize the content you already have to rank for them.

How do you know which keywords you can do this for? Try this:

Export your competitor’s keywords

Paste them into Keywords Explorer
Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
Look for Parent Topics you already have content about

For example, if we analyze our competitor, we can see that seven keywords they rank for fall under the Parent Topic of “press release template.”

Our competitor ranks for seven keywords that fall under the "press release template" cluster

If we search our site, we see that we already have a page about this topic.

Site search finds that we already have a blog post on press release templates

If we click the caret and check the keywords in the cluster, we see keywords like “press release example” and “press release format.”

Keywords under the cluster of "press release template"

To rank for the keywords in the cluster, we can probably optimize the page we already have by adding sections about the subtopics of “press release examples” and “press release format.”