If your competitors rank higher than you, it means their SEO strategy is outpacing yours.
However, you’ll never find this out unless you know what your competitors do.
Understanding your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses will help you adjust your SEO strategy, identify opportunities, and make data-driven decisions. That’s where competitive intelligence tools for SEO come into play!
During my SEO career, I’ve tried various tools for managing websites and analyzing competitor landscapes. I know how challenging it is to choose a suitable tool, considering the variety of options available that claim to show you how to improve SEO.
To save you time, here’s my list of the best SEO competitive intelligence tools you can rely on. I’ve carefully picked tools based on their features, pricing, and competitor research capabilities to help you make an informed decision.
This table of contents will help you navigate the post:
- Semrush
- Ahrefs
- Similarweb
- BuzzSumo
- Visualping
- SpyFu
- Data.ai
- Ubersuggest
- Surfer SEO
- Screaming Frog
- Adthena
- Digimind
1. Semrush
Semrush is an all-in-one digital marketing software with over 40 tools for keyword research, technical SEO, backlink analysis, rank tracking, and competitor analysis.
It’s the most reliable tool on the market because Semrush has the most extensive database, including over 25 billion keywords, 43 trillion backlinks crawled daily, and over 808 million domain profiles you can analyze.
Furthermore, Semrush has a dedicated set of Competitor Website Analysis Tools to analyze every aspect of your competitors’ online presence. In particular, you can benchmark your website traffic against competitors, discover keywords your competitors rank for but you don’t, analyze competitors’ ads and social media activity, and so much more!
My favorite is the Organic Research Competitors report, where you can immediately grasp how you’re doing against your competitors, check their organic traffic, and analyze keywords that help them attract users from organic search results.
Check out my Semrush review to learn more about the features and benefits of the tool.
Best For
As an SEO expert, I choose Semrush for its diverse and powerful SEO features.
However, Semrush is much more than a competitive intelligence tool for SEO. The entire marketing team can use it.
Pay-per-click (PPC) specialists can research competitors’ keywords in paid search and display, analyze their bids, and review ad copy.
Content managers can discover competitors’ top-performing content on social media and organic search results to incorporate the best ideas into their content creation strategy.
Furthermore, Semrush has a Social Media Management tool to help SMM specialists monitor the performance of social media accounts in your niche and hop on new trends early.
If you are a small business owner or startup founder, Semrush’s all-in-one marketing solution can be an excellent alternative to other tools.
Price
Semrush is a paid tool with a 30-day free trial for new users. Compared to other competitive intelligence tools for SEO offering a 7-day trial or none at all, Semrush’s offer is very generous.
Semrush’s paid plans start from $129.95 monthly for five projects, where one project is one website, 500 keywords for tracking with daily updates, and 3,000 reports to pull daily. If you’re a freelancer or a small business owner, it’s an excellent offer that will meet all your competitive intelligence needs.
There are also Guru and Business plans for enterprises and big agencies.
2. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another popular SEO competitive intelligence tool on the market.
It was initially developed as a backlink analysis tool. However, today, Ahrefs offers various features for competitive research, such as domain overview, backlink, keyword and content gap analysis, and organic competitors overview, to name a few.
Based on my experience, the Organic Pages report is particularly helpful during competitive analysis. You can use this report to spy on competitors’ top traffic generation pages, the number of ranking keywords, the top ranking keyword, and its position.
It’s an effective way to find great content ideas and keywords not covered on your website yet.
Best For
Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO toolkit suitable for SEO professionals, freelancers working on client websites, and SEO teams.
However, it also has tools for content managers, such as Content Explorer, which helps discover and analyze high-performing content on your competitors’ websites to identify content gaps and opportunities for improvement.
Price
Ahrefs is a paid tool. Unlike Semrush, it doesn’t offer a free trial.
However, you can use Webmasters Tools for free if you verify your site ownership. You can also keep track of your site performance with Webmasters Tools, but you’ll have to upgrade to use all features.
Ahrefs’ cheapest plan starts at $99 per month. However, it lacks essential features such as SERP updates and Content Explorer, to name a few.
To try Ahrefs for competitive intelligence, you’ll have to use at least the $199 Standard plan.
Be aware that Ahrefs has implemented a credit system where one credit is consumed whenever you open a report, apply filters, or request additional data in Ahrefs. If you use all credits, you’ll have to pay an extra fee to continue using the tool.
That’s why I switched to Semrush. If interested, you can check my Semrush vs. Ahrefs comparison, where Semrush seems to be a clear winner in terms of price and value.
3. Similarweb
Similarweb is a competitive intelligence tool for SEO widely used for market research, competitive analysis, and strategic planning.
Unlike many other tools, Similarweb was developed mainly to help online business owners analyze the competitive landscape and get deep market insights. Similarweb database includes over 100 million websites, 250 million display ads, and five billion search terms for 190 countries.
With Similarweb, you can analyze the incoming traffic of any website and collect information on total visits, unique visitors, page views, and more. It also provides data on traffic sources, including organic and paid search, social media, and referrals.
Best For
Similarweb is best suited for site owners, marketers, and SEO professionals. It helps you understand your audience, analyze the performance of your websites and marketing campaigns, and identify competitors’ strengths and growth opportunities. You can also check out my Semrush vs. Similarweb review.
SMM specialists can also use Similarweb to analyze competitors’ social media activity and traffic distribution for every social media channel.
Price
Similarweb is a paid tool with a 7-day free trial. It’s enough to try the tool, but the offer is less generous compared to other SEO tools, such as Semrush’s 30-day free trial.
I’ve used the Similarweb Starter plan for $125 per month, which is a great starting point for competitive intelligence, but the plan comes with many limitations. For example, I couldn’t research keywords for a particular location. On top of that, the historical data was only available for three months.
If you want to conduct an in-depth competitive analysis, I’d recommend choosing between the Professional and Team plans.
4. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a content marketing software offering social media monitoring, content marketing research, and influencer marketing capabilities.
Besides tracking your brand’s mentions across various social media platforms, you can use BuzzSumo to spy on competitors’ social media activity, including the number of shares, likes, comments, and overall engagement.
You can also quickly research the top-performing keywords, questions, and trending topics across the web.
Best For
BuzzSumo is an excellent option if you are looking for an SEO competitive intelligence tool to help you with social media monitoring, content marketing research, and influencer marketing.
Even though BuzzSumo wasn’t particularly developed for SEO, you can use the tool for keyword research, backlink analysis, and domain overview.
Price
BuzzSumo is a paid tool with a 30-day free Suite plan trial, normally $399 monthly. This plan unlocks all BuzzSumo features, including competitive analysis, unlimited projects and exports, 10 custom alerts, and up to five years of historical data.
This plan is suitable for marketing teams and brand agencies. If you are a freelancer or manage a small online business, you can start with the Content Creation plan for $159 monthly.
5. Visualping
Visualping is a monitoring software that allows you to track website changes, modifications, and content alterations.
It takes snapshots of a webpage at regular intervals and then compares them to identify any differences. If changes are detected, the tool will notify you via email.
The good news is that you can use Visualping to track all changes on your website and spy on competitors. Depending on your needs, you can monitor all or some changes on a desktop or mobile version when up to 50% of a page’s content is changed.
I think it’s an essential tool for analyzing competitors’ recent actions that help them succeed.
Best For
Product managers, business owners, designers, and copywriters can use Visualping to monitor changes on their websites, including price changes, new content publication, bugs, and promo ads, to name a few.
However, it’s also an excellent competitive intelligence tool for SEO. Imagine you can spy on every change your competitors implement on their top-performing pages and use the insights to improve your clients’ content strategy.
With Visualping, you don’t waste time figuring out what your competitors do differently. Instead, you can rely on it to monitor all SEO changes.
Price
Visualping is a paid tool with generous offers for individual users and businesses.
If you manage a small website and want to use Visualping to keep track of changes, start with a free plan. It tracks changes daily for up to five pages.
Business plans start from $100 monthly and are customized for your online business needs. Furthermore, Visualping offers a 14-day free trial for companies to test its functionality before upgrading.
6. SpyFu
SpyFu is a powerful tool that can help you discover your competitors’ organic and paid search strategies, including their top-ranking keywords, ad campaigns, bidding keywords, and backlink sources from the past 17 years. That’s an enormous amount of data stored and retrieved daily to help you conduct in-depth competitive analysis.
I can’t recall any other tool with such a long historical data span except Semrush. Its database has stored backlinks, domains, traffic overviews, and keywords since January 2012.
Best For
SpyFu is an excellent SEO competitive intelligence tool for teams, small site owners, and freelancers. Besides tracking your website’s performance and competitor strategies, you can also use SpyFu to assess the likelihood of your website ranking for a particular keyword in organic search results. It’s a valuable feature that can help you save time and focus on keywords with high potential.
SpyFu will also be helpful for PPC experts who need to continuously optimize ads depending on the competitive environment in paid search.
Price
SpyFu is a paid tool without a free trial. There isn’t a free plan either, which makes the tool testing more challenging.
However, SpyFu offers a 30-day money-back guarantee for anyone who has paid for the tool but wants to cancel a subscription for some reason.
In my opinion, a free trial removes the entry barrier and shows the value of a tool to users. Even though the Basic monthly plan is only $39, SpyFu will likely lose some potential customers unwilling to upgrade without trying the tool first.
7. Data.ai
Data.ai (formerly App Annie) is a data-tracking tool for mobile applications.
Besides tracking your app performance, it’s also a powerful competitive intelligence tool to understand user engagement, retention rate, and market trends.
With data.ai, you can identify your competitors, compare your app’s performance to competitors’ apps, and gain insights into their organic and paid performance.
Best For
Product managers can use data.ai to get detailed analytics data for their mobile apps, such as the number of downloads, in-app purchases, total app revenue, user ratings, and other performance metrics across various app stores.
SEO experts can also use data.ai data from over 8 million apps to improve apps’ discoverability in app stores.
However, due to its complex payment system and absence of monthly subscriptions, I’d only recommend the tool for teams and enterprises.
Price
Data.ai doesn’t publicly list its prices on the website. You have to get in touch with the sales team to inquire about the payment plans and ask for a demo.
However, I’ve done a quick research and found a limited free plan for its Data.AI Intelligence product for mobile market insights.
As I’ve already mentioned, data.ai doesn’t offer monthly subscriptions. Instead, it provides customized plans depending on your business needs.
8. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a popular SEO tool developed by Neil Patel, a world-known digital marketing expert.
Even though Ubersuggest is positioned as a keyword research tool, you can also use it to track your website performance and competitive intelligence.
For instance, you can check any website’s top page by traffic, backlink sources, top-performing keywords, and similar websites (depending on the inserted URL), to name a few.
Even if you use a free version of Ubersuggest with three monthly searches, you can easily switch between traffic estimation and keyword research reports without consuming available searches. It’s very convenient for quick competitive analysis.
Furthermore, you can create separate projects for every competitor to track their rankings and site health.
Best For
I use Ubersuggest as an addition to other SEO tools and can undoubtedly say it’s suited for SEO teams or freelancers. Ubersuggest’s interface is clean and easy to navigate, which makes it an excellent option for SEO beginners and professionals.
Content managers can use the Ubersuggest Content Ideas report to quickly find top-performing content on the web for particular keywords and generate new content ideas.
Price
Ubersuggest is a paid tool with a 7-day free trial.
Compared to other competitive intelligence tools for SEO, Ubersuggest has affordable plans starting at $29 monthly for site owners with one domain. The Individual pricing plan lets you track up to five competitors, 125 tracked keywords, and 2,000 keywords. Furthermore, you can audit up to 1,000 pages and run 150 various searches daily.
9. Surfer SEO
Surfer SEO is a powerful SEO tool with the primary goal of helping you create optimized content to drive organic traffic.
It analyzes top-ranking pages for your keyword and provides optimization tips based on findings, including suggestions for keyword usage, content length, and on-page optimization tips.
However, you can also use the software as a competitive intelligence tool for SEO. With Surfer SEO, you can see a detailed SERP overview, which includes competitors’ content length, keyword density, and usage.
This information saves you hours of manual research and analysis of competitors’ top-ranking pages. I know this because I’ve manually analyzed competitors’ on-page SEO strategies for a long time before finding suitable tools to automate and speed up this task.
Best For
First of all, Surfer SEO is for SEO teams and independent contractors working on client websites. They will particularly benefit from keyword research, site audit, and backlink analysis features.
However, it’s also an excellent tool for SEO content writers. The Content Editor inside Surfer SEO enables you to create and edit content directly in the platform, while real-time feedback and suggestions help optimize content for rankings.
Price
Surfer SEO is a paid tool without a free trial and a free plan. I remember the days when Surfer SEO had a 7-day free trial, but they’ve replaced it with a 7-day money-back guarantee policy. Honestly, I don’t think it’s a great alternative since there is no way to test the tool for free now.
The cheapest pricing plan starts at $89 annually or $139 monthly (Surfer AI included) for 100 keyword daily searches, 15 articles for editing in the Content Editor, and five AI-generated and optimized articles.
10. Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is an advanced web crawler and SEO tool for technical website audits.
You can use Screaming Frog to discover technical SEO issues on your website, such as broken links, redirect loops, missing meta tags, duplicate content, 4xx status errors, and other issues that may impact your website’s performance in organic search results.
Furthermore, Screaming Frog can help you analyze any competitor’s URL to discover its strengths and weaknesses.
For example, you can use Screaming Frog to discover URLs where competitors fail to optimize their meta titles and descriptions. If you target the same keywords, optimizing metadata can help you improve your website’s click-through rate (CTR) and attract more organic traffic to your website.
Best For
Based on my experience, Screaming From is primarily suited for technical SEO specialists who regularly deal with backlink audits and website analysis.
SEO and marketing teams can also use Screaming Frog as a competitive intelligence tool for SEO to research the current state of competitors’ websites and define growth opportunities.
Remember that Screaming Frog is an advanced SEO tool that may seem complex for beginners.
Price
Screaming Frog is a paid tool, but it’s more affordable than many other SEO tools. Screaming Frog sells yearly licenses instead of monthly subscriptions, where one license costs $259 and includes access to all software features. If you need more user seats, you can purchase additional licenses for $259 each.
There is also a free version with limited functionality and a crawl limit of up to 500 URLs.
11. Adthena
Adthena is an all-in-one competitor intelligence platform for paid search advertising. The platform can help you gain insights into your competitors’ advertising strategies and improve your own paid search campaigns.
The platform can help you understand competitors’ target keywords, ad copy variations, calls to action (CTAs), landing page copy and optimization strategies, and the overall ad spend.
I particularly find Adthena’s alerts and notifications about significant changes in competitors’ strategies helpful since they help make timely strategic improvements.
Best For
Adthena is suited for branding and marketing agencies and e-commerce companies that want to improve the performance of their paid search campaigns.
SEO specialists can also use Athena’s paid search advertising data to discover high-converting keywords for targeting in organic search.
Price
Adthena is a paid tool that doesn’t publicly display its subscription pricing. After conducting quick research, I realized that Adthena’s business model resembles data.ai’s model. Both platforms provide annual pricing plans customized to your business needs.
There is no free plan or a free trial. However, you can get in touch with Adthena’s support team via a contact form on a website and request a free demo.
12. Digimind
Digimind is a social listening and market intelligence platform that can help you better understand your target audience, marketing trends, and competitive landscape.
There is one particular feature I want to highlight, which is called Brand Reputation.
In a nutshell, Digimind tracks online conversations in various locations to help you understand how your brand or competitors’ brands are perceived in different parts of the world. I think it’s an excellent way to measure online reputation and optimize content creation strategy.
Best For
Digimind can be helpful for various online businesses, including e-commerce websites, branding and marketing agencies, and media companies, to name a few.
However, SEO specialists can also use Digimind to benchmark their website’s performance against competitors, analyze competitors’ top-performing content, and implement the best ideas into their content creation process.
Since SEO is more than keywords nowadays, improving the social media activity of a website will help establish authority and improve E-E-A-T, which can positively impact organic rankings.
Price
Like Adthena and data.ai, Digimind offers a free demo if you want to test the software.
According to Captera, Digimind doesn’t have a free plan but offers flexible pricing depending on the features you want to include in your custom pricing plan.
Wondering Which SEO Competitive Intelligence Tool Is Best for You?
You made it to the end of the article!
I’ve reviewed the best competitive intelligence tools for SEO, which you can also use to research market trends, analyze competitors’ social media activity, and spy on paid search ads.
But if you were to ask me which tool to use, I’d choose Semrush every time. It has an all-in-one Website Competitor Analysis toolkit to help you assess competitors’ organic traffic, keyword strategy, incoming and outgoing backlinks, paid search activity, and more!