Crafted Labs - Know Your Competitors

Tools to help find and understand your competitors.

Introduction.

Online competitor research is one of the most important steps in the creation of your marketing strategy. You need to understand your own business, but you also need to know who else is out there and what they are doing.

However, discovering your competitors can sometimes be challenging, because your online competitors may be different from your offline competitors.

In this toolkit, we’ve put together a list of some of the best competitor research tools and methods that’ll help you to find your competitors online.

While the tools and methods that we’ve listed below will help you to identify some of your competitors and the tactics/strategies that they’re using online, we’d always recommend following a more robust process when it comes to your digital marketing strategy. Crafted’s consultants can discuss how we would approach an insight project based on your needs. If you’d like more detail, get in touch.

Tools.

Semrush.

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Semrush is a popular tool among those working in search marketing. It gives you information about your current performance online, including traffic, ranking positions and importantly, your organic competitors.

You can use the Organic Research Competitors report to see which terms your competitors are appearing for within search results and in which position, so you can compare their rankings with yours, helping you to discover new opportunities based on what they are currently ranking for.

The report is simple—just enter your domain name in the search bar (making sure you are under Organic Research and then find the Competitors tab), and Semrush will list all of the sites that compete for the same keywords as your domain - based on common keywords and having a similar total organic keyword count.

The great thing about Semrush is that it not only gives you information about your organic competitors, but also about the paid competitors too, so you’ll have more information when undertaking your research.

The Advertising Research Competitors report is very similar to the Organic Research Competitor report and measures your competitors based on shared keywords and similarity in total keyword count. Simply enter your URL in the search bar and then go to Advertising Research and then click on the Competitors tab and you’ll see those you’re typically competing against in paid search.

Note that with Semrush, the information you’re able to see is limited to the package you have purchased so the free options are limited.

You can then find more information about their keywords, rankings, backlinks and more.

The great thing about SpyFu is that it’s easy to use and gives you a lot of interesting information on how your competitors are doing in an easily digestible way, with visual charts and reports. It also allows you to add and monitor custom competitors, and you can add them to the competitor report easily.

Note that you can get a lot of information for free, but if you want to get the most out of SpyFu you will likely need to upgrade to a paid subscription.

SimilarWeb.

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SimilarWeb is a digital marketing intelligence platform and you can use it’s Competitive Analysis Suite to:

Find your top competitors
Analyse their traffic across marketing channels, including paid and organic search traffic
Look at the traffic distribution by geographical regions
Discover what’s working to drive traffic and find growth opportunities

One of the strengths of SimilarWeb is the variety of insights you can get from it including organic, paid, social and display.

So, even when you find your competitors you can continue digging into SimilarWeb to know more about the marketing strategies they’re using.

The report will then show you each of the websites that rank in the top 10 for the same keywords as your website.

Once you have this information you can then use the tool to delve into how they’re getting their traffic and where it’s coming from, the keywords that they appear for but you don’t, which featured snippets they appear for and whole load of backlink information as well as link opportunities.

Expert Tip

If your website is new then you might not get very good or accurate results. Instead, you should go to the Keyword Explorer, enter some of your top keywords (those that your customers/audience would use to find your products or services) and then go to the Traffic Share by Domain report. You can then see the businesses that share similar traffic to yours based on the keywords that you search.

Search & generative AI.

No list of tools would be complete without mentioning AI.

With significant advances in recent years, when it comes to competitor research, AI and in particular, chatbots and conversational AI, simply cannot be ignored. ChatGPT, Google Gemini & Microsoft Copilot are some of the main players, although there are a lot of other AI tools out there that can help you to find your competitors, simply by asking them.

To find out who your competitors are, you can simply enter prompts into each of the tools. For example:

Who sells (Insert Product) in (Insert location)?
Who offers (insert services) in (insert location)?
Generate a list of businesses who offer (insert product/services) in (insert location)
Who dominates the market share for (insert product/services)

You’ll then get given a list of businesses who are likely to be your competitors. Simple!

Ad Libraries.

A great way to uncover your competitors, including the messaging and creative they're using in their ads online, is through Ad Libraries. Due to ad transparency laws, all major platforms are required to share ads being run by brands.

There are a number of platforms that provide access to ad libraries, such as:

Meta Ad Library
Google Ads Transparency Centre
Twitter Ads Transparency Center
LinkedIn Ads Library
TikTok Ads Library

When using these ad libraries, you can use a number of methods to find your competitors.

Keyword search: Start by entering relevant keywords or phrases related to your industry, products, or services into the search functions of ad libraries. This can help you to uncover ads from competitors who are targeting similar keywords or topics.

Searching by industry: You can also search by your industry. Explore the categories or industries that matter to your business within ad libraries to discover the competitors operating in your sector. Ad libraries often categorise ads based on industry, making it easier to identify competitors within your niche.

Following ad trails: Examining ads from complementary or related products or services can also lead you to find other competitors.

Once you’ve identified some of your competitors, you’ll be able to see the types of messaging and creatives they’re using, the landing pages where they’re driving traffic, the call-to-actions they’re using, whether they’re collaborating with partners, and the platforms they’re focusing on.

Google.

It may seem obvious but one of the main options to discover your online competitors is Google.

You can use Google to find your competitors by conducting a simple search using relevant keywords or phrases related to your industry, products, or services. Take note of the websites that appear in the top search results, as these are likely your direct competitors vying for visibility in the same space. From on-page factors to links, taking time to investigate each result will help you to find trends that could be contributing to your competitors appearing higher in the result pages.

If you sell specific products you can also use Google’s Reverse Image Search. Simply upload an image of your product or logo to Google Images and see if there are any similar products or brands that appear. This can be a great way of finding unexpected competitors.

Watch out for.

It’s important to note that Google’s search results take into account various factors such as your search history, your location, the device type that you’re using, and your user preferences to deliver tailored results that are most relevant to each specific user. As such, when conducting research to find your competitors, it’s important to use a variety of tools to gain a better understanding of the landscape.

Expert tip

You can use the “related:” search operator to find similar websites to yours. Just type related: followed by your domain name and you will see a list of similar websites.

Not only you will find all the businesses that offer similar products or services around you, but you might you can even find some ideas to improve your local listing. For example, do you have the star rating snippet? Do you have more or less reviews than your competitors? Are they using the 360 tour inside their premises? What kind of images do they use?

By analysing this information, you can gain insights into your competitors' strengths and weaknesses, identify opportunities for differentiation, and refine your own business strategy to stay competitive in your local market.

Expert Tip

Take note of which businesses are using Google Maps to promote their services through ads or sponsored listings. Keep an eye out for advertisements displayed on the map or in the search results, as they’ll help you to understand your paid advertising competitors as well and may include businesses that aren’t nearby, but are still advertising their business within your area.

BuzzSumo.

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BuzzSumo is a comprehensive content research and social media analytics tool that helps marketers discover popular content, analyse trends, get content ideas, and identify key influencers in their industry.

Whilst BuzzSumo won’t explicitly help you to find your direct competitors, it’s a great site to find your competitors when it comes to your content marketing efforts.

In the Content Analyzer tool, you can simply add the relevant topics to your business within the search bar and a list of the top articles will appear. You can filter the results by articles, infographics, giveaways, videos or other type of content. You can also select the country, language and period of time. You’ll then be able to discover what type of content has been performing well on social channels and those that have the most engagement, allowing you to see what you're up against.

Meltwater.

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Meltwater is a powerful online media monitoring and intelligence platform, and a great tool to measure your share of voice inside your industry. It also allows you to compare your competitor’s developments on social media.

By adding your key terms to the tool, Meltwater can help you find related content and businesses and will show you heat maps, keyword clouds, publishers and more. This can help lead you to the discovery of new competitors in your social channels and, even more interestingly, allows you to track the evolution of those competitors in the channels you are most interested in.

Businesses can also then track mentions of their own brand as well as their competitors across various online channels, including news websites, social media platforms, blogs, and forums. The platform provides real-time alerts and insights into competitor activities, allowing businesses to stay up to date on their industry trends, news, and developments.

Note that Meltwater is a paid for tool and as such the more advanced the solution you choose to go with, the more data you’ll get.

SEOmonitor & other keyword ranking tools.

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SEOmonitor is primarily a keyword tracking tool that allows businesses to plan and monitor their keyword performance as well as forecast their SEO efforts. However, in a similar way to some of the other tools we’ve mentioned, it can also be used to find your competitors.

SEOmonitor’s Rank Tracker lists the top websites by visibility for any list of keywords.

You can track and store the top 100 ranking landing pages on all of your tracked keywords and, as a result, this means that you can then see an in-depth view of each of your competitors for that set of keywords.

It also allows you to conduct extensive keyword research by exploring your top competitors’ ranking keywords.

There are a number of other, very similar keyword ranking tools out there that can also help you to find your competitors.

These include Stat, a rank tracking tool that you can use to follow your performance and your competitors in search results. You choose the keywords that you want to track and, based on that set of keywords, Stat will offer you a competitive landscape with your top competitors for those keywords.

Advanced Web Rankings (AWR) also allows you to follow the improvements of certain keywords, previously added by you. To find your competitors, you only need to select the keyword you are most interested in and AWR will give you a list of websites from the SERPs. Then, you can select certain competitors to keep tracking their performance via AWR and compare their rankings with yours.

Conclusion.

Using these tools will help you to break away from some of the more conventional ideas around who your competitors might be and to find those that might not have thought of.

This is just the start of your competitor analysis and one of the first steps in the creation of your wider marketing strategy.

If you want to really outperform, you’ll need to undertake full competitor analysis and delve into the strategies and tactics that your competitors are using to ensure success. It’s all about digging deeper into the data, discovering new opportunities, identifying fresh trends, and capitalising on your competitive advantages.

Partnering with an agency can help. You’ll be able to make the most of your marketing strategy, working with specialists who have experience in helping you to outperform your competitors.