Competitor Research For SEO

Keeping abreast of your competitors is vital for SEO marketers. You can research this by using a number of helpful online tools which will keep track of your competitors' SEO activities. These tools will help inform you of customer's search rankings as well as a variety of other factors which will help inform you of their marketing efforts.

Some of these factors include:

• targetted keywords
• use of paid marketing
• organic vs paid inbound clicks
• paid keywords
• estimated monthly PPC clicks
• top keywords
• adwords buying recommendations

There are many tools available to help with competitor research, some of the most popular are identified below:

SpyFu

SpyFu exposes the search marketing secret formula of your most successful competitors. This paid service allows your to search for any domain and see every place they've shown up on Google: every keyword they've bought on Adwords, every organic rank, and every ad variation in the last 11 years.

SEMrush

SEMrush not only helps you perform day-to-day task, but also provides in-depth analysis that is very clear and can be easily incorporated into your digital marketing strategy and significantly improve your performance.

Buzz Sumo

Buzz Sumo gives you the ability to quickly identify what content is working well in an industry and who the major influencers are. You can search for terms/phrases and quickly identify content that's performing well in a niche or with an audience.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs helps you to learn why your competitors are ranking so high and what you need to do to outrank them. This is one of the biggest SEO competitor research sites in terms of index size, freshness and overall usability. Many an SEO specialist will use this tool on a daily basis.

As well as the above sites, you can also use a site monitoring tool to identify new links or content that your competitors are making on their sites. This will help you see what they're doing to generate traffic and enable you to get ahead of the curve.