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We’ve all heard the adage: The best defense is a good offense. To have a good offense, you must understand your opponent’s strengths and weakness. In marketing, this is done through a competitive analysis. Since marketers do not have direct access to performance data from their competitors, they rely on third-party software to compile this data. While I was interning at Wunderman DC, I had the opportunity to work on a competitive audit for one of our clients. I have already mentioned some social listening platforms in a previous post so, here, I will focus on SEM and SEO analysis platforms.

First, let’s define SEM and SEO. SEM stands for search engine marketing. It has essentially come to mean paid search (i.e. the sponsored links you see at the top of Google searches). SEO is the other side of the coin. It stands for search engine optimization. SEO essentially means improving the content of your website to organically rank high on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Since Google is constantly updating its search algorithm, SEO techniques are always changing. Nevertheless, there are a couple main pillars to SEO that remain constant year over year. While SEO involves a great deal of effort and time, it has the potential to drive high-quality traffic to your site.

Now that we have defined SEO and SEM, let’s take a look at the various platforms that report on and analyze these metrics.

SEMrushSERPstatSimilarWeb

SEMrush is a great platform to get basic information on website performance. Marketers can search websites and get an overview of the organic search traffic, the paid search traffic, the backlinks and the display advertising. Beyond that, marketers can use the SEO Content Template to get suggestions on how to rank better on the keywords that a company has chosen to use. The interface is very user friendly and nice to look at.

SERPstat provides the same SEM and SEO performance overview. Yet, it also has more in-depth analysis on backlinks. Moreover, the platform features a rank tracker and a site audit. It’s very clear that SERPstat’s main concern is getting the clients to the top of the search results.

SimilarWeb also provides the website performance overview however, it’s clear that that’s not its only focus. The platform not only looks at SEO and SEM but the other channels as well. My favorite report from this platform is the Channels Analysis. With the Channels Analysis, marketers can view user engagement based on the channel from which they came. Furthermore, SimilarWeb doesn’t only track where the users are coming from but also where they go once they leave the website. Finally, on SimilarWeb, marketers have the possibility to directly compare their performance to that of up to four competitors.