SEO competitor analysis tool:

Research the websites of your competitors

SEO PowerSuite's Rank Tracker is a convenient tool to discover and track competitors:

1. Launch Rank Tracker, create a project for your website, fill in your top keyword phrases, select your target search engine(s), and hang on a moment while Rank Tracker analyses your site's organic rankings for the keywords you just put in.
2. Go to Preferences > Competitors, and click Suggest.

Rank Tracker will pull the target keywords you just copied into your project and build competitor research on them. Now, hit Next.

3. Select the search engine to run SEO competitor research in, and click Next once more.
4. Rank Tracker will now look through the top 30 results for all keywords you entered and put together a list of competitors that come up most frequently. In a minute, you'll see your competitors sorted by their visibility in search results for your target keywords. Choose the competitors you'd like to add to the project, and hit Finish.

That's it — your top SEO competitors are stored in your Rank Tracker project for further competitive analysis. From now on, every time you check rankings, competitor ranks will be updated alongside, making up a keyword ranking history.

Now that you have such a valuable piece of intelligence — the list of your top competitors, collect the general SEO stats to get a better understanding of your online competition (and increase your chances to outrank them).

1. With the help of Rank Tracker's Domain Strength module, you can collect and compare the following SEO stats for your competitor research:

• Domain age
• Alexa rank and traffic forecast
• IP address and country
• Number of pages indexed in major search engines
• Number of backlinks
• Social media popularity

Rank Tracker will also score the analyzed competitors to help your determine how strong they are.

Scroll through the tool's traffic estimator report to see how much traffic your website gets (according to Google Analytics):

2. To spy on your SEO competition by looking at ranking difficulty of your keywords, go to Target Keywords > Rank Tracking, click on any keyword, and study the Keyword Difficulty module under your keyword list:

Here you can see top 10 competitors for a specific keyword and analyze such important metrics as competitor link profiles, intent, and domain authority.

At this step, it makes sense to cross out some competitors that significantly outperform you, and focus on the lower-hanging fruit. Or, you can prioritize your SEO efforts by separating the competitors to be challenged first from those to compete with later on.

Now it's time to run competitor keyword research and get your hands on the keywords your top competitors rank for this very moment.

1. Rank Tracker has a keyword spy tool that helps you research competitors' SEO keywords which they rank for right now.

1) To see your competitors' keywords, launch Rank Tracker and create a project for your site.

2) Go to Keyword Research > Ranking Keywords, paste any of your competitors' websites into the search box, select Desktop or Mobile rankings, and click Search. Alongside the list of your competitors' keywords, you will also get the number of keywords for this URL, its potential traffic, and SERP features:

2. SEO PowerSuite's Rank Tracker also runs the TF-IDF analysis for your keywords driven by latent semantic indexing principles and your top-ranking competitors.

TF-IDF (short for "term frequency-inverse document frequency") is the product of how often a keyword appears on a page (TF) and how often it is expected to appear on an average web page, based on a larger set of documents (IDF).

Don't panic, you don't have to do the complex calculations on your own (that would be a complete waste of your time) — all can be managed right within Rank Tracker's Keyword Research module.

The TF-IDF tool analyses the top-ranking pages for your target keywords and looks for frequently used ones. These are the topic-relevant terms and concepts that will help you increase the relevance (and hence the rankings) of your pages in the semantic search era.

To start the competitive research, simply launch Rank Tracker and create a project for your site. Go to Keyword Research > Domain Research, out of a few available keyword research tools, select Competition TF-IDF Explorer, paste your seed keywords, exclude negative keywords to make the semantic analysis more precise, and press Search.

This way, you don't get a merely random keyword list — you get a list of semantically tied phrases that appear important and relevant to search engines. By gathering this kind of topical concepts, you'll be able to build a comprehensive content strategy.

3. If you are looking for a Google keyword tool alternative, Rank Tracker has an in-built Google AdWords Keyword Planner for millions of keyword suggestions. All you need to do is:

1) Launch Rank Tracker and create a project for your site.

2) Go to Keyword Research > Keyword Suggestions > Google AdWords Keyword Planner and enter your keywords:

Mind that Rank Tracker has 20+ keyword research tools. You can use any of them to unearth even more keyword ideas.

4. Now you can move the necessary keyword groups into the Rank Tracking module and start monitoring their rankings alongside competitors':

1) First of all, in your Keyword Research dashboard, select the keywords or keyword groups you would like to monitor, right-click them, and choose Move Selected Keyword(s) to Rank Tracking:

2) Then go to Target Keywords > Rank Tracking and click Show Competitors on the top pane of your dashboard. If you didn't add any competitors before, do that by clicking the Manage Competitors option:

3) Now it's time to monitor competitor ranks:

Now that we have a list of competitors and a list of the best keywords, it's time to look at the landscape of Google search results and see what kind of environment you are competing in.

In Rank Tracker, there's a very handy feature to help you run an SEO SERP analysis by monitoring SERP types and changes — Google SERP Features.

All you need to do is create a project for your site in the competitor tool and go to Target Keywords > Rank Tracking. Right-click any column in your dashboard and check the box Google SERP features. It will appear among your other columns.

Using this data, you can:

• See which SERP features your site already ranks in;
• See which features are present for the keywords you're tracking and represent the best search traffic opportunity;
• Check which of the SERP features are occupied by your competitors.

Seeing a competitor getting a variety of SERP features for multiple keywords? Why not run a bit of SEO research and take a closer look at their content, meta tags, structured data, and links! All these insights will help you estimate your chances to occupy those SERP spaces. Plus, they will give you an idea on how to optimize your site's pages for various search result types and get more visible to your potential customers.

Having the lists of all the competitive keywords, you can feel an urge to create new pages around them. To make those pages fit in nicely in your current site structure, peek at how your competitors organized their websites.

SEO PowerSuite's competitor tool WebSite Auditor can graphically visualize the structure of any site, so you won't have to spend days collecting the pages and then weeks analyzing them.

Launch WebSite Auditor and create a new project for any site. Go to Site Structure > Visualization and look at the interactive graph:

Using the data collected and processed by the competitor tool, you can:

1. See the most important landing pages of your competition;
2. Analyse click depth;
3. Look through orphan pages (if any);
4. Check internal PageRank distribution.

After you analyse the competition tracking results, see how your own site's structure could be improved and add notes to your visualization right in the competitor tool. After that, you'll be able to export the changes as a report and send it to your web-developer:

By using the insight you get from analyzing on-page optimization of competitor pages, you can revamp your own landing pages.

For this step, you can use one of the SEO PowerSuite's competitor analysis tools WebSite Auditor and its Content Analysis module. You'll find all the info you need to optimize any given page for your target keywords, based on the pages that rank in the top results for the given terms.

Additionally, you'll be able to get recommendations on improving your content to make it more comprehensive and topically relevant, based on the TF-IDF formula.

Here's how to run a check:

1. Launch WebSite Auditor and create a project for your site.
2. Go to Content Analysis and select a landing page you'll be optimizing (if you're not sure where to start, it's a good idea to optimize your homepage first). Enter your target keywords and choose your target search engine.
3. Once WebSite Auditor has completed the analysis, check the crucial content optimization factors on the left for any errors or warnings.

4. Select one of the factors with an Error or Warning status (if any), and go to the Competitors tab for tracking competitors for this particular aspect of SEO. If there's a tangible discrepancy between how different competitors use keywords and you're not sure what to base your on-page strategy on, it's a good idea to use Competitor avg. as a reference.
5. To go beyond the traditional keyword usage factors, let's do some semantic search engine optimization. Jump to WebSite Auditor's TD-IDF dashboard to discover the topically relevant terms (both single- and multi-word), sorted by the number of competitors that use them. The Recommendation column will give you usage advice for each term that appears on the pages of 5 or more of the competitors.

You can implement these recommendations and edit your page right in WebSite Auditor's Content Editor.

Backlinks audit and research is a crucial step in the competitive analysis. When you fully understand the backlink profiles of your competitors, you'll be able to build your own effective link strategy, estimate the time required to build a strong link profile, and spot valuable backlink opportunities in the profiles of your competitors.

In other words, you need to find competitor backlinks and analyze how good they are. For this part of the analysis, you can use SEO PowerSuite's competitor tool for backlinks SEO SpyGlass. Unlike many backlink SEO tools, it has one of the biggest and freshest backlink indexes and finds new backlinks faster than any other tool (be that Ahrefs, Majestic, SpyFu, or anyone else).

1. Launch SEO SpyGlass and create a project for your website.
2. Go to the Domain Comparison module, and click Add Domains. In a window that pops up, enter the URLs of the sites of your competitors that you just discovered with Rank Tracker. You can monitor backlinks of 2 competitors in the free version, 5 with SEO SpyGlass Professional, and 10 with Enterprise.

At this step of competitor monitoring, you'll see a detailed comparison of your backlink profile and the profiles of your competitors' backlinks. Here you can discover what it is that makes a given competitor stronger than you.

Focus on the total number of competitors' backlinks (particularly dofollow links) and linking domains, growing your InLink Rank, and the diversity of IPs and C-blocks in your link profile.

Having compared backlinks of your competitors to yours, you should have a clear understanding of where you'll be directing your backlink strategy.

Quality backlinks take time to build, so this has to become your long-term commitment if you're serious about outranking your competition. Luckily, there's a handy Link Intersection dashboard in SEO SpyGlass that will help you big time with your link building efforts.

3. Go to the Link Intersection dashboard and switch to Potential backlink domains. This is a filtered view for sites that link to your competitors, but don't link to your site. Click on the header of the Projects column to sort the view by the number of sites each referring domain links to.

This way, you can discover precious link building opportunities — domains that link to a bunch of your competitors are likely relevant resources that you have a big chance of getting a link on, too. You may want to export this list for outreach by hitting the download button in the top right corner of the screen.

4. In case you have some niche keywords in mind, you can filter backlinks by keyword in titles or anchor texts to immediately see the most prominent opportunities. In your Backlinks dashboard, go for the Quick Filter box. Select a column you want to filter out and paste in your keywords: