Today, digital marketing is like playing American football, you know your opponents, you watch them and each time you see their mistakes you are trying to take off a ball from them and make a touchdown to win the game.

All your marketing initiatives are all built around collecting information about your competitors and analysis of their online activity. Yet, it can be very time-consuming to do that by searching for data and making imperative conclusions based on the information you were able to find online. That is why it is worth using different online tools to get all the information about the competitors’ online presence. Of course, you cannot get into your competitors’ head and predict their next step, but you can analyze their current situation and use successful approaches in your own activities. That is why we decided to collect the best tools which will help you to watch the competitors’ activity online.

Seven powerful tools to keep a wary eye on your competitors

1. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the most used tools for the backlinks and keywords analysis, as well as social media presence monitoring. Its “Competing domains” report allows getting information about your competitors and finding out their current SEO situation, keywords they are focused at and backlinks they have. You can also watch changes in backlinks strategy of your competitors’ overtime. This will help you to retarget your activities and find missed opportunities for link building. The tool is expensive and membership plan price starts from 99 USD monthly. But it certainly gives a lot of opportunities in return.

2. Majestic

Majestic SEO is another online tool available for backlink analysis. It allows you to watch backlinks history of your own and competitors’ websites, giving you opportunities to use successful strategies and watch the implementation of new ones. Comparing with Ahrefs it doesn’t analyze social media presence, so you won’t able to get information about the backlinks and mentions of your website on social networks. Though, it is cheaper than Ahrefs and has almost the same functions. Monthly subscription here starts from 50 USD monthly.

3. Similar Web

This powerful tool is focused on competitors’ analysis. It uses unique algorithms which allows seeing how the traffic goes to the competitor’s website, what are traffic sources, referrals, and keywords. According to the reviews, this is the only tool which gives marketers an opportunity to look inside Google Analytics account of their competitor and use this information for your own online activities. Similar Web is quite expensive and starts from 199 USD/month.

4. SpyFu

SpyFu is a powerful tool for keyword planning. The main advantage of this tool is that it allows you to analyze PPC initiatives of your competitors, and it is more effective than Google’s Keyword Planner. Moreover, it helps to find organic search keywords of your competitors. The tool itself is cheaper than its analogs and price starts from 80 USD monthly. The main con is that processing of the large volume of keywords can be very time-consuming.

5. SEO Monitor

SEO Monitor is more than just another keywords analysis tool. With smart features it includes it allows you to build up and forecast the performance of your SEO and content marketing strategy. It helps you to analyze yours and competitors’ performance, track visibility, rankings and other things you might be interested in. It uses Google data-based algorithms for obtaining keywords, as well as comparing with Google Analytics brings back lost keywords ignored by the search engine. It is affordable and price starts from 24 USD/ month.

6. Moat

Moat is a unique tool which allows seeing what content, no matter if it is text, video or image gets more attention at social networks and search engines. It doesn’t allow you to just enter your competitors and get all data about them; it gives you more than just numbers and keywords. The “word of mouth” information you will get by using Moat will help you adopt your SEO and content marketing initiatives to the latest trends. Pricing is available per request and depends on your current needs.

7. iSpionage

iSpionage was initially launched as a tool for competitors’ pay per click campaign analysis, but it grew into something bigger. Right now, it allows finding not only PPC campaigns’ keywords but also who your competitors are, their organic keywords, how much they spend on their campaigns and much more. Besides a nice feature set, this tool is quite affordable, price starts from 59 USD monthly.

Whether you are doing content marketing, trying to increase your SEO ranking or planning to launch your contextual advertising campaign, the research of your competitors will be the major part of your work. Using different online tools for the analysis will help you not only find the right keywords for your online activities but also to exclude unsuccessful initiatives and save your budget for more profitable ones.

If you are using other tools for the competitors’ analysis and think that they are worth attention, it would be great to hear more about them!

Rachel Bartee is a content writer and a marketing consultant at EduGeeksClub. She is content-oriented and knows how to put words into action. Get in touch with her on @rachel5bartee.