A marketer’s job is dynamic, demanding, and dependent on having a constant eye on your competitor research. Understanding and predicting industry trends is important, but maintaining your knowledge about the competition is even more so. Your competitors are wading in the same pool, so it’s your job to fish delicately for the right leads and to position your company be found by your target audience. Competitor analysis entails researching SEO, social media, PPC, and AdWords tactics.

As written in an article on entrepreneurial-insights.com, How to Perform Competitor Analysis, “…conventional environmental scanning puts many such establishments at risk of hazardous competitive blindspots owing to their lacking in healthy competitor analysis (CA). Knowledge of how to carry out this analysis properly will help you devise strategies to seize market share from your competitors.”

Given all of the factors that play into thorough competitive research, we’ve compiled 7 of our favorite competitor research tools. Using these tools will enlighten your stance on what makes your competitors successful and the area where your business can thrive. With the prevalence of tools that can aid you to outrank your competition, you have no business to not improve your business.

1. Alexa.com by Amazon

The forefront of your competitor analysis should to understanding where your website ranks in comparison and measuring your traffic and website activity. Alexa’s site comparison tool makes it easy to rank your site against up to 9 competitors.

• Compare historical traffic trends, visitor engagement, and traffic sources
• Receive detailed analytics including audience demographics and bounce rate

2. SpyonWeb

This research tool is a must-have for marketers who want to know the inner depths of their competitor’s online activity. SpyOnWeb will search for websites owned by the same company and provide page rank and IP address. In a review, ShopifyNation suggests to “Use it to find additional domains that are used by the same owner; sometimes you can find landing pages hosted on separate domains.”

3. Simply Measured

This social media measurement software provides in-depth social media analysis reports to keep your social presence strong and effective. You can easily compare the competition social media reach and influence, and use it as a benchmark for your own social activity. Check out a sample report here.

4. Spyfu

Analyzing the success, or lack thereof, of your competitor’s AdWords and SEO techniques makes Spyfu an invaluable tool for your analysis. Gather intel into how much your competitors are spending on their campaigns and for which keywords they’re ranking. Before you invest time and money into optimizing your content for a keyword, this tool will show you which other companies you’re up against.

5. Campaign Planner by Bing Ads

Newly launched by Bing Ads, their Campaign Planner feature allows the user to choose specific industry verticals and review the competition’s ad coverage, industry benchmarks and keyword results. A September 18th SearchengineLand article by Ginny Marvin explains, Campaign Planner offers marketplace insights including search traffic trending and forecasting data, industry benchmarks, competitor performance and keyword suggestions.”

6. SEMrush

This platform has a handful of tools, including ones that identify the keywords used by your competition and the websites linking to your competition. An exciting new tool (still in beta) is their Position Tracking. Per their website, Position tracking is available for you to monitor any daily changes in the positions of your competitors for organic and Adwords keywords in Google.”

7. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

If you want your onsite SEO to beat out that of your competitor’s, you’ll want to download this UK-based desktop program. The ability to export SEO intel about a website into an Excel is ideal for relaying recommendations to your website developer. As explained on their homepage, It’s particularly good for analyzing medium to large sites where manually checking every page would be extremely labour intensive (or impossible!) and where you can easily miss a redirect, meta refresh or duplicate page issue.”