When you are a business owner, one of your biggest concern is how other businesses are doing. There is a fine line to walk here. In one sense, you want them to do well, because it helps the community and you want to support other local businesses. But, at the same time, you want to know that your business is doing even better. If it isn’t, you need to find ways to make it better.

So, you have to start at the beginning, and look for ways to analyze your competition. Here are 10 tools and resources that will help you to do just that.

1. Shopify Business Encyclopedia

Before you can start analyzing the competition, you need to know how to do it, what to look for, etc. The Business Encyclopedia is one of the best resources you will ever use. It is loaded with information about every aspect of running a business, including competitor analysis.

2. SpyFu

This tool allows you to search for any domain, and find every place that they have shown up on Google. You will learn every keyword they have used in the last nine years, and then you can use them too to get the same kind of results that they are seeing.

3. Majestic SEO

Often, a site ranks high because of what is known as link popularity. When a site has a lot of links, it has a higher domain authority, and it is going to outrank you in searches. Enter any site here to see how many links they have.

4. Compete

Here is a tool that lets you measure the digital performance of your competitors. You can use it to find new business opportunities, keep an eye on your competition, benchmark performance, and more. The more you can learn about your competition, the better able you will be to set your bar even higher.

5. SimilarWeb

If you want to see what kind of traffic your competition is getting, this is a great tool to use. All you need to do is enter the website in question to get traffic estimates, page visits, how long people spend on the site, and more. Then, you can look at the site to see what they are doing that you are not, and change your own site to get similar results.

6. Searchmetrics Essentials

You are also going to need tools to measure the search engine performance of your competitors. This tool lets you enter a site, and see the rankings for top search phrases. This is going to help you to create better pages, because you will be focusing on the things that people are searching for.

7. Hubspot’s Marketing Grader

You can enter the name of a business for competitor analysis, including search optimization, Facebook shares, information about their mobile site, and more. There is also a “marketing grade” which allows you to compare a site or business to your own.

8. Simply Measured

This is another comparison tool that can come in pretty handy. You can enter the Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube accounts of competitors to find out what keywords followers are using.

9. Alexa

Another traffic and visitor activity analysis tool you should check out is Alexa.com. You can compare other sites to your own, and if they are doing better than yours is, then you can start looking at what they do and emulate their success.

10. Open Site Explorer

Here is another tool that will let you check out links and domain authority. This is going to help you to create better phrases that will bring that traffic to you instead of the competition.

Let us know what you think!

What concerns you most about your competitors? Are there any research tools you can’t live without? If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear from you below!

This article was originally written by Jane Hurst on the Heyo Blog.