It is not possible to integrate the work of a digital marketer without recourse to a multitude of services and online SEO and social media tools, which help automate its work and analyze competitors’ sites.
In this article, we will look at the best options available.
The tools:
The tools to track brand mentions
- Mention
- Brand24
- Hootsuite
- Open Social Buzz
The tools for finding backlinks
- Ahrefs Site Explorer
- Majestic Site Explorer
- Monitor Backlinks
- BacklinkWatch
Tools for keyword research
- Serpstat
- iSpionage
Tools for determining on-site positions in search results
- SeRanking
- Alexa
- Masters microsite
The other tools
- Marketing Grader
- SEMRush
- WooRank
- Similarweb
SEO Tools to track brand mentions
With this set of tools, you can track mentions of a brand, company, or its product on social media, news portals, forums, blogs, and more.
Mention.com
Mention is used by 500,000 companies, including ASOS, Microsoft, Spotify, etc … This online service monitors brand mentions in 42 languages from a million different sources: on social networks, news portals, forums, blogs, and any other site.
Using this tool, you can track how often and in which countries your competitors are mentioned, whether customers are talking about it positively or negatively.
Mention is presented in a basic free version and 3 paid plans, the cheapest of which costs € 29 per month. You can also try a free demo version for 14 days.
You can register on the site through social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, or by creating an account.
Brand24.com
Brand24 is a tool that works with over 30,000 brands around the world. Its users represent many well-known companies, including Panasonic, IKEA, H&M, or Raiffeisen Bank.
This tool provides data from over 25 social networks, news portals, blogs, forums, etc. It can help you find mentions of competitors in specific sources and determine customer attitudes towards their business.
The received data report contains graphs on the number of mentions and their emotional appreciation, pages of sites with mentions. All results are sorted by different sources (Facebook, Twitter, video, photo, blog, forum, etc.).
Hootsuite.com
Hootsuite, a free tool to monitor brand mentions on social media such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, Foursquare, and Google+.
Over 10 million people use Hootsuite, including well-known companies like NYC, Hershel.
This tool searches for mentions of competing companies by keywords provides weekly analytical reports. It is ideal for working in a team (you can create tasks for employees and send private messages).
You can use the demo version of Hootsuite Pro free for 30 days. Paid versions start at $39.
You can sign up for Hootsuite through Twitter, Facebook, Google, or by creating an account.
Open Social Buzz – social-searcher.com
Open Social Buzz: Data search solution on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sources in real-time.
After registering with your personal account, you can track brand mentions, names of people, or any phrase.
The tool provides different types of analysis in the form of graphs and diagrams: by emotional ratings of users, by the number of posts, subscribers, views, by types of content (videos, images), and by keywords.
The free version of the service has some limitations: you can perform a hundred searches per day and receive two email notifications. There are 3 paid plans that you can use to get more search queries and notifications.
Paid plans allow you to monitor, save posts, and find all mentions of a business. Their cost starts from $3.49 per month.
SEO tools for finding backlinks
Backlink tracking tools can help you determine the quality and quantity of links on your competitor’s sites.
Ahrefs.com
In addition to determining the volume of link mass, this tool also predicts organic search engine traffic (the data is not always completely reliable, but you can get an idea of the competitor’s site), which pages have the most links, as well as the most popular keywords, for which the site occupies a high position in the search engines.
Paid registration will allow you to receive weekly or monthly reports on competitor links.
Ahrefs offers 3 tariffs. The cost of the cheapest is $99 per month. You can use a 7-day demo version of the Lite ($99 per month) and Standard ($179 per month) plans for $7. The most expensive plan costs $999.
Majestic.com
The creators of Majestic call their site the largest link database in the world, and they boldly state that no other database will provide such detailed information.
The tool performs bulk backlink checking, compares link profiles and website traffic (you can’t compare more than five sites at a time), and searches for keywords or phrases.
The free version is limited to 15 daily scans. The basic rate is $47 per month. Paid subscriptions, on the other hand, provide a deeper analysis of results and API connectivity.
MonitorBacklinks.com
Monitor Backlinks automatically searches for backlinks from competitors and searches by keywords, allows you to add filters for the following tags: link status (nofollow, meta nofollow, meta noindex, bad anchor, not found, etc.), text from anchor, page state, etc. domain in Google Index, social media sharing, link counting, etc.
All the data received is sent to the service users by e-mail in the form of reports.
There are 6 paid plans on the site, the cost of which starts from $25. Each of these prices (except Custom) offers a 30-day trial (demo) version, which is a huge advantage for this tool compared to other platforms.
BacklinkWatch.com
This site is for those who do not have the time to register and understand the interface of the analysis tools. Here, you need to enter the name of the competitor’s site, a captcha, and click a button to start the verification. Pages found with backlinks will gradually load in a separate list.
It is best not to crawl large sites with a large number of links. Otherwise, there will likely be a lot of “garbage” in the list. It would then be difficult to find high-quality websites there. But for monitoring small websites, the service is quite suitable.
SEO Tools for keyword research
Competitor keywords mainly help form the correct structure of your site and optimize your pages for popular queries.
Serpstat.com
The Serpstat platform will display almost all the keywords for which the site is displayed in search engines.
With the help of the built-in “Tree view” tool, you can even see for which phrases a particular page is displayed in the search results. But that’s not all – it shows the cost of a click in pop-up advertising for each word, frequency, the exact position in search results, number of requests per month, etc.
In a separate category, you can see which queries your competitors are promoting. You can compare the statistics of three sites at the same time. This way, you can identify keywords that you might not have noticed or missed, but other businesses are using successfully.
You will not be able to consult the site without registration. The free rate is limited to 10 sentences per day. To learn more, you must either activate the trial period or purchase one of the four packages. The minimum rate is $69 per month.
iSpionage.com
The iSpionage tool contains over 22 million keywords. It helps identify competitors in Google Adwords, shows their SEO and PPC (Pay Per Click) strategies and estimated monthly budget, provides a full list of their keywords which can be sorted to find top performing keywords, and sends notifications on the data found.
To use this tool, you need to register for free. The free version allows you to create 10 reports per day. The platform offers 3 paid plans, the cheapest of which costs $59 per month, with a 30-day trial period.
SEO Tools for determining the positions of a site in search results
Checking the positions of competing sites in search results is one of the regular and important SEO tasks, which allows you to evaluate the results of work on your site and find problematic pages.
SeRanking.com
SeRanking offers several useful SEO tools, including checking site rankings. Here it is possible to track the promotion results not only in search engines but also in YouTube video hosting.
You can choose almost any country and region in the world. In addition to tracking the positions of your website, Serpstat also allows you to analyze your competitors. You can choose almost any country and region in the world. In addition to tracking the positions of your site, Serpstat also allows you to analyze your competitors.
There is a 14-day free period. After the trial period ends, you can choose the appropriate pricing plan: payment by check or monthly subscription. Price from $26 per month.
Alexa.com
Alexa allows you to determine a site’s visibility in organic search results and get detailed reports of on-site traffic (traffic sources, traffic growth rate, number of inbound links, average time on site ), identify relevant keywords, etc.
To get information about any site, go to the Alexa site info page.
Enter the desired domain in the search field.
You will have access to certain information. To get more data, you need to register.
Alexa offers many features for SEO specialists. The tool also allows you to determine the geographic location of the site audience, visitor engagement rates, web traffic sources, and many other parameters.
Alexa also provides some pretty detailed statistics for keywords. More importantly, the platform finds missing keywords.
If you need a site traffic analysis feature, a monthly subscription will cost $79 (a free trial is offered for 7 days). A more advanced plan for one user and one site, with many options, will cost $149(14 days free). For agencies, the price is $299 (20 users and 35 sites with a 30-day trial period).
Micrositemasters.com
The main advantage of this is that it monitors the positions of sites in Google, Bing, and Yahoo: daily updating of data, processing many keywords and integrating with Google Analytics.
The service offers 3 fixed price plans starting at $49.95 per month (with a 30-day trial period).
The other SEO tools
Some online platforms have more than one of the features listed at the same time or don’t fit into any of the above categories. They will help you keep track of your competitors’ actions.
MarketingGrader.com
Marketing Grader: It is a free tool that gives an overall rating of the website, providing a detailed analysis:
- Determining page requests,
- The speed of its loading time,
- The amount of traffic coming from mobile devices,
- Site SEO evaluation (page titles, page meta description, etc.).
To get a report on the website’s performance, to determine its advantages and disadvantages, you must enter the URL in the search field of the landing page. To use Marketing Grader, registration is not required.
SEMRush.com
SEMRush is one of the most popular SEO marketing tools. It already has 800,000 users, including well-known companies such as Philips, PayPal, Forbes, Hyatt.
The tool performs keyword research, finds backlinks, low-frequency keywords, searches for competitors on social media, determines their position in search engines, and identifies their ads.
The service finds the most popular anchor texts. It also determines the number of dofollow and nofollow links, click tracking, and backlink types.
SEMRush offers 3 paid plans starting at $99.95. The rates differ by the number of daily reports and the data present in each report. Reports include project results, keywords, crawl pages, and even social media profiles. In the higher tariffs, brand reports in PDF format, “historical data,” etc.… are available.
WooRank.com
More than 500,000 users and 40,000 companies use the WooRank tool, including amazon.com, FIAT, Fujitsu, FedEx, Deloitte. This tool allows you to conduct competitive analysis by comparing data from multiple competitors. It checks the optimization of the site and monitors the KPIs.
It delivers detailed site reports with data on backlinks, keywords, traffic, visitors and notifies new data users weekly via email.
WooRank is presented in 3 paid plans (the first starts at $59 per month) and a free demo version for 14 days.
Pricing differs depending on the number of users and detailed reports, the number of competitor analyses performed, backlinks and keywords searched, and also the ability to download reports in PDF format.
Similarweb.com
A popular free tool that lets you get brief information about the traffic, referring sites, and social activity of any site of interest. The useful “Compare” option allows you to compare the performance of two different web resources.
Additional information on traffic, user interactions, and marketing channels will be available in a paid version. You can use the advanced features for free for one week and then submit a request to update your account.
