Competitor Analysis Tools (And a Sample Website Analysis With Only 2 Tools)...

Competitor Analysis Tools (And a Sample Website Analysis With Only 2 Tools) Your competitors can be a goldmine of information that can inform every aspect of your marketing and rocket your websites traffic.

In this article youll find: A short list of the best competitor analysis tools available right now.A super detailed competitor website analysis using the two most powerful tools from that list.

Lets get started!

Competitor analysis tools Competitor analysis is a lot easier when you have the right tools.

Weve tried out a ton of different services over the years, so we feel confident in saying that these are the best.

1. SimilarWeb Widely used as a traffic estimation tool, SimilarWeb has loads of cool features that let you peek behind the scenes at your competitors strategy.

Find out which channels are driving traffic to your competition with stats for traffic distribution, top organic & paid search keywords, top ad networks, audience interests, and competing websites.

Sounds like a lot. And it is.

2. Ahrefs Yes, were biased, but theres a reason Ahrefs is consistently listed as one of the top SEO tools in the industry.

Our primary focus is SEO and content analysis, and you can use our tool to analyse competitor keywords (organic and PPC), backlinks, traffic stats and more.

Find out which pages on your competitors site are bringing in the most backlinks, social shares, and traffic, by running the Top Pages reports. Or dig deep into their link profiles with Site Explorer.

With 192 billion pages in our database, weve got the largest index of backlinks on the web.

Note: Later in this post, youll find a detailed sample competitor website analysis carried out with just the 2 tools above. So if thats why youre here, just jump to it.

3. Audiense This service will help you analyze your competitors audience based on their Twitter followers.

See stats on location, gender, interests, and the languages of those who follow your competitor.

4. Builtwith Dig deep into your competitors website technologies and tools with this handy service.

Builtwith can uncover their web server, advertising services they use, analytics technologies, and much more. You can even find out which email services a given website is using.

5. WhatRunsWhere Find out where your rivals are advertising and peek at the creative they are using for their ads.

Enter a domain too see its current adverts or pop in a keyword to see which ads run for it.

WhatRunsWheres creators claim that their data is updated daily, which will let you monitor changes in your competitors ad campaigns.

(AdBeat is a similar solution worth looking at.)

6. Compass Although this tool is still in its early stages, Compass has already collected a database of 3 million unique ads across Facebook and LinkedIn. Type in a relevant keyword to see whos advertising on these strong social platforms in your niche.

7. Simply Measured A free tool from SimplyMeasured called Facebook Competitive Analysis can easily compare your Facebook fan page with that of your rival.

It will show you general engagement stats for posts and a valuable metric of Engagements as % of fans.

8. Rival IQ Rival IQ will analyze your social media performance across all the major social networks and compare it to your competition.

Add your competitors website to your dashboard to compare audience growth, post engagements, and top posts.

9. Fanpage karma This service can show you the best (and worst) performing posts from your competitors Facebook fan page. Uncover the most frequently used words and hashtags, and analyse user reactions.

Fanpage karma will also give you hints on what type of content to post on Facebook, and the times of day to post, by analysing your competitors performance.

Plus youll get an estimate of the advertising value of your competitors Facebook posts.

Sample website analysis Our blog is focused on content and SEO, so thats what were going to focus on in our sample competitive analysis.

And for the purposes of the walk-through, well pretend were about to launch a brand new infographic design tool.

Part 1: IdentifyingCompetitors

The first thing we need to do is identify our main competitors.

To do that we need to know exactly how potential customers will search for our service.

I figured that would be something like infographic design tool. But turns out I was wrong.

Because when I search for infographic design tool in Ahrefs Keywords Explorer (andclick on Also Rank For), we can see that the search with the highest volume is actually infographic maker.

With a KD (keyword difficulty) score of 93, its going to be tough to rank for. But if we want to be the biggest in the infographic design business, then thats got to be our ultimate aim.

Now lets run a Google search and see whos ranking.

Looks like the 3 guys Ive highlighted under organic search are going to be our top competition in search. But Im also interested in the two companies who are running ads on the keyword.

So, Im going to grab all 5 and add them to a new spreadsheet:

Now letspull some key stats to see what were up against.

Pulling Key Stats For Each Competitor To give us an idea of how entrenched the competition is (and how tough it will be to break into the niche) were going to pull some stats and metrics for each of our competitors domains.

First, lets find out how much overall authority (power) each site has.

We can use Ahrefs Domain Comparison tool to analyse all 5 domains at once.

Tools > Domain Comparison > Enter competitors domains > Compare

Well get a load of useful stats back for each site. But for now Im interested in: The Domain Rating for each siteThe total number of referring domains (Ref Domains).

A high DR score indicates that the site has good authority and is likely to rank well in search.

A high number of referring domains could also be an indicator of a strong site provided those links are not low quality.

At a later stage well want to figure out whether thats because the site/service is organically popular, or if they have a particularly effectivelink building/PR strategy. Either way, well be able to gain an insight by fully analysing their backlink profile (heres how to do it).

But for now Ill add the figures to my spreadsheet.

As you can see, all of the sites have a high number of referring domains and good authority.

Why These Metrics Are Important SEO metrics give you an indication of the overall competitiveness of a niche.

When your competitors have a high DR score they are likely to have been around for a while and

acquired a solid backlink profile.

Ina nutshell: More quality links = higher DR score = more trust from Google.

So what does this mean?

In simple terms, if2 sites launch a piece of content targeting the same keyword, then the site with the higher DR score will (probably) rank highest.

Which sucks when your site is new.

But the good news is thats not the end of the story.

Because when we analysed over 2 million keywords, we also found that it was possible to outrank sites with higher DR scores by building backlinks to individual pages.

So if your site is new and is in a competitive niche with high DR scores, then your initial plan should be to build links directly to pages you want to rank.

And as you do that Your DR score will also start to increase!

Sidenote.

Domain Rating scores are exponential, so its easier to get from DR10 to DR20 than it is to get from DR20 to DR30 (and so on). Which meansa site with a DR score of 80 isnt twice as powerful as a site with DR40 it could be many times more powerful.

I should also point out thatGoogle deny overall domain authority influences rankings,however,all our testing findsa strong positive correlation between DR and rankings. That being said,as we also found links to individual pages trump overall DR it could be that this is caused by sites with higher DR naturally attracting more backlinks to individualpages. Remember, correlation is not necessarily causation.

Analysing Competitor Link Growth Next Iwant to get a feel for how many new referring domains each site is acquiring per month.

Why? Because your competitors wont stand still.

So, if one of your competitors is acquiring 200 new referring domains each month, then youll probably need to build more than that just to catch them.

This is not an exact science, but if we take an average over the past few months we can get an idea of how things are moving.

We can do that by running the New Referring domains report in Ahrefs Site Explorer and setting the period accordingly.

Site Explorer > Enter domain > Explore > Referring domains > New > Set custom period > Show New referring domains

Looks like easel.y acquired 672 new referring domains in the 3 month period between August and October. So thats an average of 224 per month.

Ill run this report for each of our competitors and add the numbers to my spreadsheet.

Checking The Link Acquisition Curve Its also worth checking out if your competitors link growth is consistent, or if they have experienced a big growth over a short period.

The Referring domains graph on the Site Explorer Overview page shows us link growth over the past year in a nice visual format.

For example, we can see that Venngages link growth has been consistent.

While Visme have had a big spike in referring domains over the past few months.

That could be the sign of an active SEO campaign. So we might want to take a closer look at their recent backlinks to find out what theyve been up to.

We can nip back to the New referring domains report and select a period to analyse. Below I have filtered the report to show referring domains for October (view individual links by clicking the Backlinks button).

Ill probably want to export this report for later analysis.

Why Understanding Competitor Link Growth Is Important Link popularity remains the biggest single SEO ranking factor.

Which means that over time youll want to build a link profile which is on a par with (or ideally better than) your competitors.

Understanding the rate at which your competitors are acquiring new referring domains (linking sites) gives you a rough target to shoot for with your link building.

In my example niche, the number of new linking sites each month is pretty high. But in other niches youll find link growth is slower, or even static.

Either way, your aim should be to acquire links faster than your competitors.

Sidenote.

I should point out that not all links are equal. One link from a high DR site may be worth the same as several links from low DR sites. See chapter 1 of our link building guide for more on assessing the value of a link.

Part 2: Traffic Analysis

We know who our competitors are. Weve grabbed their key metrics. Its now time to take a look at their traffic.

Heres what we want to find out: Where they get their trafficWhich countries provide their trafficWhich sites provide the most referralsTotal monthly traffic & key stats (pages/session, time on page, bounce rate) We can pull all that information from a great competitor analysis tool calledSimilarweb.

Lets walk through the process for one ofour competitors (Easel.ly).

Well start by entering their domain into the Website Analysis search box.

Clicking the site takes us to an overview page, which has lots of useful stats.

But for a bit more detail, well run some specific reports.

Where Do They Get Their Traffic (Sources)?

If youre familiar with Google Analytics, youll know that Google splits traffic sources into the following channels: Organic search (traffic from search engines: Google, Bing etc)Referral (clicks to your website from links on other sites)Direct (typed in URLs, bookmarks, clicks from messages etc)Paid search (Google adwords, Bing ads etc)Social (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc)Email (clicks to your website from emails. Your email list is likely to be #1 source here)Other (unidentified traffic sources, some feeds) Like this

Now, in an ideal world, wed be able to take a peek at our competitors Google Analytics account to find out which channels are driving their traffic but as thats about as likely as Scotland winning the World Cup, the next best thing is to get an approximation from SimilarWeb. We can do that by running the Traffic Sources Overview report.

Well get a percentage figure for each channel.

And well also get a chart showingestimated traffic volumes.

Of course Social doesnt really tell us much. So the good news is we can click through to get an actual breakdown by platform.

Much better.

Why Traffic Sources Are Important Understanding which sources provide the most traffic to your competitors will help you decide where to focus your marketing efforts.

For example, in certain niches, there might be huge traffic from social media.

If we look at publishing giant Buzzfeeds traffic sources, we can see that they get over 50% of their traffic from social:

So if you were launching a site in the publishing space youd want to make sure your content was highly shareable.

In other niches, organic search might be the biggy.

Travel site TripAdvisor get two thirds of their traffic from search, with just 1% coming from social:

And if youre running an Ecommerce site, then you might find your competitors are spending more on ads.

Online beauty retailers LookFantastic pick up around 14% of their traffic from paid search:

As you can see traffic sources vary from niche to niche, so its essential that you know exactly where the traffic is in yours.

What The Traffic Sources Data Tells Us Here are the traffic sources for our 5 competitors.

While there is some variation from site-to-site, we can infer a general trend and rank traffic sources for the niche:

Direct TrafficSearch TrafficReferral TrafficSocial TrafficEmail TrafficPPC TrafficDisplay Traffic Indeed, if we calculate the average value for each channel we get thefollowing:

Between direct traffic (typed in URLs, bookmarks), search traffic (lets call a spade a spade: thats Google) and referrals (linkclicks from other websites) we have over 90% of total traffic for the niche.

Which suggests our growth strategy should be: a) Acquiring new customers from Google searchand referral trafficb) Retaining them Iwont be covering client acquisition and retention in this guide. But as its clear our competitors strategies are effective, here are a few pointers for what we would want to look at: How do our competitorsget potentialcustomers into their sales funnel (email capture, lite version, free trial etc)?How do they convert them from potential customers into actual customers?How do they retain them?

What we will be taking a closer look at is our competitorsorganic traffic and referral traffic.

Organic traffic will be covered in part 3, but for now, lets find out whats driving all that referral traffic.

Sidenote.

I already mentioned that SimilarWeb traffic figures are estimates. They should not be considered to be 100% accurate, but in the absence of precise data they are sufficient to give us an insight into our competitors traffic levels and sources.Which SitesProvide The Most Referrals?

Nowwell take a look at which sites are currently providing the most referrals to our competitor.

With a free SimilarWeb account we can see the top 5 referring sites by running the Referrals report under Traffic Sources.

Here are the top 5 referrers for easel.ly.

Why Understanding Your Competitors Top Referrers Is Important Whats the best kind of link to get to your site?

We already covered metrics. So you might think that the answer would be a link from a high DR site.

And yes, thats a great link to get. Its definitely going to help move your site up the search engine rankings.

But the very best kind of link is a link that drives actual referral traffic.

After all, thats what links are for right?

When you know which sites drive referral traffic to your competitors you can make it a priority to pick up links from them.

The best bit: Without getting too technical, its very likely that Google assesses the likelihood of a link being

clicked when calculating how much weight it should pass to your site.

So not only will they send you traffic, theyre going to be powerful links for SEO purposes too.

Which is why knowledge of your competitors top referrers is marketing gold.

What The Referral Data Tells Us We already know that referrals account for (roughly)25% of all traffic in the niche.

My first thought is this seems a little high.

When Hubspot benchmarked traffic sources across 15,000 sites, they found that average referral traffic was 10% for business to business sites and 9% for business to consumer.

Which got me wondering: Are these referrals coming from natural links acquired through PR/outreach? Or are they perhaps affiliate links generating commissions for the referring sites?

Lets take a look at the top 5 referring sites for all our competitors.

Theres one site that clearly stands out.

Creativebloq.com is the top referrer for 4 of our competitors and the number 3 referrer for the other one.

So lets take a look at those links.

We can use Ahrefs Site Explorer to show us all links pointing to a competitor site from a particular domain.

Here are the links pointing to CanvafromCreativeBloq.

Site Explorer > Enter competitor domain > Explore > Backlink profile > Referring domains > Search in results: creativebloq.com > Expand backlinks

When I checked the individual pages, it turns out these are regular links and there does not appear to be an affiliate relationship.

But I did discover why referral traffic is so high.

Because when I click the green arrow next tothe first two backlinks and preview thestats for the referring pages it turns out they get HUGE organic search traffic.

The first referring page gets 26,000 organic visits per month.

Pretty big.

But the second gets a whopping 43,000!

Its easy to see how a link from one of those pages could drive a ton of traffic.

Which means: a) The high referral percentage for the niche is likely to be accurateb) Well want to do everything we can to build a relationship with CreativeBloq and pick up links from those pages!Which Countries Provide Their Traffic?

Next we want to find out which countries provide the bulk of our competitors traffic.

We can get that information by running the Geography report under Website Audience.

Here are the top 5 countries for easel.ly.

Sidenote.

Traffic data for more countries is provided with pro account.What The Country Data Tells Us There seems to be a decent amount of traffic coming from India and Mexico.

Well need to look into this in more detail, but if these are potential customers (and not cheap Facebook clicks), then it might be cheaper (and easier) to target these countries initially.

Whats Their Total Traffic And Key Stats?

It might seem a little unintuitive to gather this information last.

But there is a good reason.

We can pull this information for all of our competitors in one go using SimilarWebs Compare feature.

When we click the button we can select up to 5 sites to compare.

And we get everything we need in the Website Audience > Overview report.

Simple!

Andnow our competitive analysis spreadsheet is filling up nicely.

Why These Stats Are Important We recorded several metrics above, so lets quickly go over each of them.

Monthly traffic This is the total monthly traffic the site receives from all sources.

When we grab this figure for several of our competitors we get an immediate feel for the overall size of the niche (and potential traffic).

And of course we also find out exactly who the biggest site(s) in the niche are.

Visit Duration The average time spent on site by each visitor.

Generally, a high average visit duration is desirable as its a sign that visitors are engaged with the site/content.

Pages Per Session The average number of pages viewed by a visitor to the site.

Again, the higher this figure, the more likely it is that visitors are engaged with the site and sticking around.

Bounce Rate

And talking of sticking around, the final metric we are interested in is bounce rate.

A bounce is when a visitor clicks through to a website site and then clicks back (or closes their browser tab) without viewing any more pages.

High bounce rates can be a sign that visitors are not finding what they are looking for on the site.

Although this is not always the case.

Wikipedia for example has a very high bounce rate (84.85%):

But thats probably because visitors get exactly what they need (information) from the page they land on, then move on to their next search.

Overall though, if you notice a competitor has: high average time on sitelots of pages per sessiona low bounce rate Then youll want to take a closer look at their site.

Chances are they have a good user experience and content thats resonating in your niche.

You can find all of these metrics for your own site in your Google Analytics Audience Overview report.

Compare your sites metrics against your competitors to see how youre shaping up.

Part 3: Organic Traffic Analysis In this section were going to dive a little deeper into our competitors organic search traffic.

Well be using Ahrefs Site Explorer and analysing one competitor at a time.

Checking Organic Traffic Volumes And Key Stats We already got an indication of total organic search volume for each competitor fromSimilarWeb, but well want tocheck the figures in Ahrefs.

Clicking on the Organic search tab on the Site Explorer Overview report for a domain shows us: Total organic traffic per month (chart by country)Total number of keywords (chart by country)A breakdown of organic traffic by country Site Explorer > Enter competitor domain > Explore > Overview > Organic search

Recommendation As with SimilarWeb our traffic figures are estimates and should not be considered 100% accurate, but in the absence of precise data they are sufficient to give us an insight into our competitors organic traffic.

Spying On Our Competitors Organic Keywords Next we want to find out which keywords are currently driving our competitors search traffic.

We can do that by runningthe Organic keywords report for each domain.

Site Explorer > Enter competitors domain > Explore > Organic search > Organic keywords

Above we can see that Visme are currently ranking for 7,243 keywords.

By default the report will be ordered by actual traffic volume (calculated based on their search position).

But we can also order the report by total search volume if we wanted to find some particularly juicy keywords to rank for.

Theres some enticingvolume there, but Recommendation Pay attention to the KD (keyword difficulty) score for each keyword.

Itcan be tempting to go for keywords with big volume. But a high KD score means it will be tough to rank without building a lot of links.

Our enhanced Keywords Explorer tool provides an estimate of the number of backlinks required to rank for a keyword.

For example, infographic maker, which has a KD score of 93, will require backlinks from 1,033 domains to rank in the top 10 positions.

If youve got your link building down, then go for it. Otherwise, it might be worth targeting keywords with a lower difficulty score to begin with.

Sidenote.

Our keyword difficulty score is calculated by counting the number of individual sites (referring domains) pointing to each result in Googles Top10 for a keyword. As backlinks remain the single biggest SEO ranking factor we find that in most cases this score provides an accurate representation of the difficulty of a keyword.

That being said, there are many other factors which influence rankings beside backlinks (on-page SEO, content depth etc) so we recommend further analysis of the search result/competition before selecting a keyword to target. We do have plans to include other factors in our difficulty calculations in the future so watch this space!

There is one more important thing you should pay attention to while analyzing your rivals organic traffic.

SERP features your competitor ranks for.

The number of SERP features Google provides in search results is constantly growing. Featured snippets alone, for example, are shown for 12% of search queries, as per our recent study. And they get almost 10% of clicks from the results on the first page.

Can you afford to neglect this?

Organic keywords report can show you what SERP features your competitor occupies, ranking for a specific keyword.

You need to apply Features filter, choose Target domain must be featured option and tick the relevant SERP features (I will tick all to give you the full picture):

As you can see, Visme is ranking in a bunch of various SERP features for quite a few good keywords.

Finding(And Filling) Content Gaps Whats a content gap?

Its a keyword your competitors rank for, which you dont.

Needless to say, thats a gap youll want to fill!

So the good news is Ahrefs has a tool specifically designed to help you find these gaps. Weve cunningly called it our Content gap tool.

By entering competitor domains into the tool you can quickly find a bunch of cool new keywords to target on your own site.

In the example below I have compared 1 of our competitors sites against the other 4. This is because myhypothetical infographics company doesntactually have a website (well maybe a hypothetical one, but thats no use here). Normally you will be comparing your own site against your competitors.

Ahrefs Site Explorer > Content gap > Enter competitor domains > Enter your domain > Show keywords

Note that I set the report to show me keywords where at least 2 of my competitors rank and at least one ranks top 10.

And it looks like there are plenty of content gaps for us to fill.

So we can go ahead and pick some cool ones for adding to our content plan.

Recommendation If your site is relatively new, use the Volume and Difficulty filters to find keywords with good search volume and a low difficulty score. The low difficulty score means they will be easier to rank for, while the solid search volume means that ranking will give a nice bump to your search traffic.

Part 4: Content Analysis In this section well be looking at our competitors content.

Specifically: Their most visited content (highest organic traffic)Their most linked to contentTheir most shared content We can pull all of the above from Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Finding ACompetitors Most Popular Content We can discover our competitors most visited content (organic search) by running the Top Pages report in Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Sidenote.

Were interested in editorial content/blog posts here, which means for most sites well want to search the blog folder URL/subdomain as opposed to the entire domain. For example, if I was analysing Ahrefs I would search ahrefs.com/blog.

Heres the report for Vismes blog.

Site Explorer > Enter competitor blog folder/subdomain > Explore > Organic search > Top Pages

In the above example we can see that Vismes content with the highest search traffic is a post about visual advertising techniques. Its currently bringing in around 647 organic search visits per month and ranking for 304 keywords.

We can viewthe individual keywords the page is ranking for by clicking the number under the keywords column.

Looks like by moving up a few positions that page could receive a lot more search traffic.

Why This Report Is Super Valuable The old school approach to SEO involved conducting keyword research to find suitable phrases to rank for, then creating individual content for each of those keywords.

100 target keywords = 100 new pages on your site1,000 target keywords = 1,000 new pages on your site Needless to say it was pretty laborious. Not to mention costly.

These days?

As Google gets better at understanding the meaning behind content, one great article can rank for hundreds or even THOUSANDS of keywords. Even if that keyword doesnt appear anywhere on the page.

An example we often use is guest posting.

Thats the same thing as guest blogging right?

And Google knows that.

Search for guest posting and Google will also return pages that are optimised for the keyword guest blogging. They even highlight the word guest blogging in the URL and content.

So why is this report so valuable?

Well, by finding your competitors top content you can figure out which of their articles are: a) ranking for a ton of keywordsb) pulling in loads of traffic And then instead of starting with a big list of keywords, you can start with a small list of articles to replicate which you already know Google associates with multiple keywords.

Much less time consuming. And much less costly.

Finding Your Competitors Most Linked To Content To find our competitors most linked to content well run the Best by links report in Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Again, well be specifically looking at blog/editorial content.

Site Explorer > Enter competitor blog folder/subdomain > Explore > Organic search > Best by links

We can see that the most linked to content on Vismes blog has backlinks from 24 referring domains.

And scrolling down the report revealsthat most posts on their blog pick up links from less that 10 sites.

Which makes them (potentially) very beatable in search with some proactive link building.

Why This Report Is A Link Building Goldmine Ive mentioned a couple of times already how important building (and acquiring) links is for your site.

Links mean referrals, buzz (your site is mentioned elsewhere on the web), and ultimately, more organic search traffic.

So we know we need to build links, but where do we start?

Simple.

We find out whats working for our competitors.

The best by links report shows your competitors top linkbait content. And if it worked for them, it can work for you too.

The trick is to create something even better than your competitors content. And then Reach out to all the sites linking to your competitor, show them your content, and ask them to link to it.

Thats it.

So how do you find all the sites linking to your competitors content?

Easy. Just click the number under the RD column for a popular piece of content.

And youll get a list of all sites currently linking to that page.

Which means that your competitor has created your prospect list for you. That was nice of them

Tip: Pay Attention To Which Types Of Content Are Working When analysing your competitors you might find that a specific type of content is working well in the niche and acquiring lots of links.

For example: Research/data based contentInfographicsVideosInfomapsExpert roundups If you notice a trend, then you might want to focus your efforts on creating that type of content.

But Bonus tip: Also Pay Attention To Which Types Of Content Are Missing On the flip side, if you notice theres a gap, i.e. text heavy content that could be simplified as an infographic, then thats another opportunity right there.

And once again you have your prospect list pre-prepared and readyto go!

Finding Your Competitors Most Shared Content Social media can drive huge traffic. So well also want to find out which of our competitors posts generated the most shares, tweets, pins etc.

To do that, well run the Best by shares report in Site Explorer.

Site Explorer > Enter competitor blog folder/subdomain > Explore > Organic search > Best by shares

Its worth sorting the report by individual social networks (click the logos) to find the most popular content on each platform.

For example, this post generated the most Facebook shares.

While this one has been pinned over 2,500 times on Pinterest.

Knowing which types of content resonate on each network willhelp to inform our promotional efforts at a later stage.

We can add thedetail gathered in this section to our spreadsheet and move on to part 5.

Part 5: PPC Analysis Finally, well take a look at our competitors PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns.

For each competitor we want to find out: Which keywords they are bidding onWhich ads they are runningTheir top landing pages Its super easy to do withAhrefs.

Just enter your a competitor domain into Site Explorer, then run the 3 reports in the Paid Search section.

Finding acompetitors PPC keywords The PPC keywords report will list all keywords your competitor is currently bidding on.

Below we can see that Piktochart are currently bidding on 151 keywords.

For each keyword we get: Their current ad positionAd block position (top, middle, bottom)Search volumeKeyword Difficulty (KD)Their traffic share (percentage)Number of resultsLanding page URL How Competitor PPC Keyword Data Can Make You More Money If your competitor is spending money on a keyword what does that tell you?

It tells you that keyword is PROFITABLE. Because unless your competitor is in the business of pouring money down the drain, you can bet that they track the ROI for all keywords they are bidding on.

And if a keyword is not converting then they will kill it.

Your competitors PPC data can unearth high converting keywords that you would probably skip right over when conducting keyword research.

For example, you might be looking for keywords with minimum search volume of 1,000.

But what if your average conversion rate is 2%?

And a keyword with search volume of 300 is converting at 10%?

Im sure youve already done the maths. That low volume keyword is going to make you more money!

So not only can you find keywords for adding to your own PPC campaign, you can also find great keywords for targeting with content in organic search.

Viewing acompetitors PPC ads To preview an ad for a keyword, we just hover over the yellow Ad icon.

Wecan also preview allour competitors top performing ads at once by running the Ads report.

Discovering a competitors top PPC landing pages Finally, to view our competitorsmost popular landing pages, well runthe Top landing pages report.

How PPC Data Shows You The Whole Funnel Wouldnt it be great if you could peek at your competitors sales funnel all the way from customer search to conversion?

Well, if youve examined their PPC data then you already have!

As I mentioned previously, you can bet that your competitors have tested and tested to find the highest converting keywords for their campaign.

And guess what?

They will have carried out the same rigorous testing with their ad copy and landing pages.

So by examining their message from ad to landing page you can figure out the language and calls to actions they use to turn searchers into customers.

And when youre looking to create (or improve) your own sales funnel, thatknowledge is priceless.

What WeLearned In This Competitive Analysis Process So now we have completed our competitive analysis, lets quickly recapwhat we discovered: Our top competitorsTheir key metrics (DR, Referring domains)Their link growth (speed and consistency)Their traffic sources (all channels)The top referring sites in the nicheThe countries which provide most traffic in the nicheTotal traffic for each competitorKey traffic stats for each competitor (time on site, pages per session, bounce rate)Theorganic keywords driving our competitors search trafficTheir top content in organic searchTheir top linkbait contentTheir most shared contentThe keywords they are bidding on in paid searchThe copy they are using in their PPC adsThe landing pages their ads point to Im sure youll agree, thats a ton of information we can use to create our own marketing and growth strategy.

But guess what?

Its just the tip of the iceberg.

Both tools (Ahrefs and SimilarWeb) have a treasure trove of additional reports we can run to, not just peek behind our competitors marketing curtain, but rip it down toexpose their entire marketing, content,and link building strategies.

Ready to get started?

You can sign up for a 14 day trial of Ahrefs here and a SimilarWeb account here.

Finally, heres a link tomy spreadsheet if you want to use the format for your own analysis.

Over To You And what are your favorite tools and practices for competitive analysis? Let us discuss them in the

comments below! https://ahrefs.com/blog/competitive-analysis/