What's the Best Domain Authority Tool or Other Competitive Analysis Tool?

[Kurt Steinbrueck]

Hi Everyone,

I'm curious what tool people have found to be most helpful for competitive analysis, be it domain authority or some other metric or means of determining competitiveness in a niche or for a keyword.

I've used SEMRush's domain authority tool most recently, but they've made changes to the tool over the years that have given some questionable results. I also recently compared SEMRush's DA vs Moz's DA. I expected to get different scores from the different tools, but I thought they might at least reasonably correspond to each other. However, I found that not only are Moz's DA scores much higher than SEMRush's DA scores, but they don't seem to correspond much.

Have you all found one tool (or maybe using data from a few tools together) that does a decent job of quickly giving a sense of how competitive a website is in their niche or for potential keywords?

Having read through several threads that addressed DA, I feel like I also have to clarify. I know Google doesn't use DA and that the tools Moz, SEMRush, Ahrefs, etc. offer are developed by them internally, not by Google. I also don't pursue DA for the sake of DA and understand that there are many factors involved in how a website ranks for various keywords.

Thanks,
Kurt

 

[ElizabethRule]

I tend to use Ahrefs for competitor analysis. Their Site Explorer tool gives a ton of search data, including a metric for "organic keywords" which is the "total number of keywords that the target website ranks for in the top 100 positions of google SERPs" - sounds like a good metric to user when gauging how often your competitors are showing in search.

Plus their link intersect tool is also awesome Link Intersect by Ahrefs: Find More Backlink Opportunities

Places Scout is another great tool that will let you see which competitors are ranking organically for the keywords you are tracking and will give you a "visibility score" that tells you how often your competitor's websites are showing up for said keywords, how many top 5 organic rankings they have etc. Can't find a help article about it but if you are already using PS for local rank tracking you are already collecting this data.

 

[Kurt Steinbrueck]

I tend to use Ahrefs for competitor analysis. Their Site Explorer tool gives a ton of search data, including a metric for "organic keywords" which is the "total number of keywords that the target website ranks for in the top 100 positions of google SERPs" - sounds like a good metric to user when gauging how often your competitors are showing in search.

Plus their link intersect tool is also awesome Link Intersect by Ahrefs: Find More Backlink Opportunities

Places Scout is another great tool that will let you see which competitors are ranking organically for the keywords you are tracking and will give you a "visibility score" that tells you how often your competitor's websites are showing up for said keywords, how many top 5 organic rankings they have etc. Can't find a help article about it but if you are already using PS for local rank tracking you are already collecting this data.

Thank you, Elizabeth, especially for including links!

I'll check these out.

-Kurt