8 Tools to Beat Your Online Arch Enemy Through Competition Research

Everyone has a theme – online rivals, enemies, competition. One of the first questions we often ask our clients is ‘who are some of your biggest competitors’ and you know what – people never say ‘oh, no one’ or ‘we don’t know, we try to focus on ourselves’. No, they all spit off three or four competitors that they want to beat, or that they want to model their digital marketing plans on.

Knowing your competition is a good thing because it means you have somewhere to start, but what do you do once you know your rival? How do you catch up and pass them?

With these 8 competition research tools.

Buzzsumo

Not only is Buzzsumo an adorable word that makes me think of both bumblebees and sumo wrestlers, but it is a great tool for content creation, finding trending topics by industry, and spying on the competition.

This tool can look at the engagement a particular piece of content is getting on the big social platforms, as well as shares across platforms and all over the web.

SEMRush

We promise, we don’t work for SEMRush and gain nothing for namedropping them. We just mention them in almost all of our tool posts because they are so helpful, easy to use, and detailed.

Additionally, SEMRush has many different tools within its platform, such as content creation or checking tools, keyword researching tools, technical SEO helps, linking strategy information, and – competitor analysis.

You can use this analysis to discover your biggest competitors, see their rankings, backlinks, even the words they are ranking for and probably targeting. Then, you can go to their page, look at how they are using their H1/H2/H3 tags and one-up them. You can go through their meta descriptions too, you sly dog.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs Site Explorer lets you see your competitions organic traffic and keywords in a convenient chart. So, if numbers aren’t your first love, this tool is for you. The visual way it lays out the data makes digital espionage easy.

Plus, you might just find some high-volume keywords that your competition is getting traffic from that you never even thought to use.

Similarweb

Similarweb helps both SEO and content endeavors, as you can actually look at your competition’s content, their traffic, as well as where that traffic is coming from and where they are sending it (to which end page).

But for the content-interested agent, you can spy on your competitor’s topics and see what their traffic is searching for, and what they ultimately visit.

MozBar

This is actually a browser extension from Moz that gives you an immediate view of how authoritative a site is by Google’s standards. That means that Mozbar tells you the domain authority of any site you see in the SERPs, and domain authority (based on backlinks) is a large SEO factor.

So, essentially Mozbar tells you how trusted (and rankable) your competition is. Also, you can compare yourself to the competition based on domain authority and see how long they’ve been gaining backlinks (and begin creating your own strategy – learn more about backlink building here).

Owletter

Instead of merely looking at page factors like content, keywords, or even backlinks, Owletter helps you spy on your competition’s email marketing. It mainly can be used to show you when (and with what frequency) your competition is sending out their emails.

This, in turn, can help you know when to send your own emails. Back in the olden days, we would use a ‘fake email’ to sign up for all of our competition’s email lists and spy that way – but this is a much less time-consuming option. Plus, it is all laid out in an easy-to-understand visually organized format.

Feedly

Just like you can use Owletter to check up on competitor’s email game without checking your junk email account daily, Feedly lets you check up on content and blogs without looking at your arch enemy’s blog daily and giving them traffic.

Feedly collects and shows you content that has been published by your competitors, so you can know what topics are being posted about, as well as trends in content strategies and posting schedules.

iSpionage

Now that you know content, keywords, emails, and even blogs of your competitors – only one major area is left: paid ads.

If you want to really dig into your competition, then knowing their paid ad spend (not just organic traffic) is imperative. iSpionage analyzes PPC (or pay-per-click) ads by telling you the number of ads, as well as the keywords they are targeting within those ads.

You can also see your competition’s competition and see who they are trying to beat out with their ad. From all this PPC data, you can even extrapolate what their budget is for their ad spend and top it (or see how their campaign goes to decide if you want to make a similar investment).

Pretty Neat, Right? Want Help Defeating Your Foe? Let JSL Marketing Be Your Superhero!

Contact JSL Marketing & Web Design today to have us deep dive into your competition and create an individualized digital marketing plan on how to beat them. We can’t wait to work with you.

11 (Free) SEO Tools for Your SERP’s Climb [2019 Edition]

It seems there are always more tools and sites popping up for SEO, ranking checks, ideal length, backlinks, keywords, and more – and that’s a good thing! But it can make it exceedingly difficult to decide which tool is the best for you, which are even good, and which ones you should straight up avoid.

Here are the 11 (free) tools that JSL Marketing & Web Design recommend if you are looking for a place to start and how to climb those SERPs (search engine ranking pages).

From SEMRush to Google Search Console, Yoast to Screaming Frog, read on to learn more about our top 11 tools for SEO and better rankings!

Woorank’s SEO & Site Analysis

Woorank not only has an adorable name, but it is also a great analyzer for your website’s current SEO.

 

This tool not only gives you an SEO score, but then tells you in easy, actionable steps what you can do to better that score.

This means it can tell you how your title tags and meta descriptions are doing, and even show you a preview of what will show up on the SERP (for all you visual builders out there).

CanIRank

CanIRank is one of the first SEO software to use AI instead of only data to give recommendations. Additionally, CanIRank gives simple ‘DIY’ instructions – though, you can also outsource and have an SEO consultant fix your website’s issues with a couple of clicks (and a fee).

 

CanIRank is unique because it lets you know the likelihood that you’ll rank for a certain keyword, or, it lets you know how competitive a certain keyword is. The AI they use can even give you suggestions about other, better keywords you can try to target instead.

SEMRush

SEMRush lets you know what pages you are already ranking for, as well as content strategy help, link profiles, errors, warnings, and more. They offer a free SEO audit which can give you a good idea of where to start as well.

 

SEMRush gives a deeper look than some of the other tools mentioned and can be as helpful as you want it to be (or as helpful as you understand).

Its detail is both a plus & a minus as it can be more difficult for ‘new’ SEO hopefuls to understand. And, of course, there is a paid version where you get the full gambit of their tools and features.

(Our team at JSL Marketing & Web Design swears by SEMRush and uses it daily)

Ubersuggest

Good old Neil Patel – a cornerstone of online work, traffic boosts, and SEO, so of course we would mention Ubersuggest, his tool that gives you a domain overview.

 

This tool is easier to understand and essentially gives you keyword ideas based on the one you insert, it also gives you domain metrics like total traffic, ad cost, organic searches, backlink data, and even content ideas.

Though this tool isn’t as in-depth as SEMRush, it can be a better starting point for new users.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a great tool because, well, it comes straight from Google, the king of search engines. So, if you are looking to get no-nonsense data straight from the horse’s mouth, then Google Search Console is a great place to start.

 

This tool can give you keyword or site performance information, index issues, your sitemap status, mobile-friendliness, and more.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog has an interesting name, yes, but it is also one of the leading website crawlers for technical SEO audits.

 

Of course, as with almost everything on this list, there is a paid version which gets you even more features, but even the free version has a lot to offer, including:

  • Broken link finder
  • Errors & redirect check
  • Analyzer for page titles & metadata
  • Technical SEO Audit
  • Duplicate page finder
  • XML sitemap generator
  • And can crawl up to 500 pages for free

Additionally, Screaming Frog is used by some big names, like Apple, Google, Disney, and Amazon, so it’s natural to trust that this tool is a good one.

Yoast WordPress Plugin

Yoast is a plugin for WordPress (meaning this won’t help you if your website isn’t built in WordPress). But if your site does use this platform, then we recommend adding in this plugin for easy edits and SEO help right on the backend of your own site.

Check out this helpful video about using Yoast from our friends at Ahrefs.

Check My Links

Check My Links is actually a Chrome extension, but it does exactly what it says – it checks your links.

 

Now, you could go through clicking each link on each page to make sure they aren’t broken, but we assume you have better things to do, so instead, use Check My Links to get all the information in a fraction of the time.

It’s easy to use, simple to understand, and an all-around nice tool for the specific help it gives.

Counting Characters (Google SERP Tool)

 

Again, the name says it all, as this is a Google tool that helps you, well, count characters.

But it isn’t just about how many characters you have; it’s about how long they are, or the pixel length.

Think of it like this – three l’s (lll) take up a lot less space than three w’s (www) and that’s pixel length. This tool helps you not only stay within the ‘character limit’ but within the pixel limit, which is the more important of the two, in most cases.

Google PageSpeed Insights

This actually falls under the whole Google Analytics umbrella, but PageSpeed Insights is just as important as their other tools, though less popular for lists like this one.

PageSpeed can be a silent killer of your webpage, because people simply won’t wait for it to load. Most people expect a webpage to load in just a couple seconds or less, and if it doesn’t, they’ll assume it is broken, a bad site, or the company isn’t reputable and take their business elsewhere.

Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to make sure the above sad story doesn’t happen to you or your business.

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test

One final Google tool for you with one final question – is your site mobile-friendly? You had better hope it is, as Google’s algorithm expects it to be, or else it’ll drop you hard and quick.

 

This tool couldn’t be easier, as all you have to do is paste or type in your URL and click ‘test URL’ to see how mobile-friendly that site is. Easy, right?

That’s what Google is known for.

Want Someone Else to Take the Guess Work Out of Your SEO Strategy? Contact JSL Marketing & Web Design & Relax!

We love all of the above SEO tools, but we don’t just use the free versions – so, if you would rather not spend all your money on the premium packages and features for each of the above, then contact JSL Marketing & Web Design and let us do your SEO for you.

We can’t wait to hear from you, learn about your unique company, goals, and ‘why’. Contact us today!