• Analyze your competitors’ on-site engagement:
  • Track the performance of your competitors’ articles across social networks.
  • Monitor session duration and bounce rates across devices and channels.

• Analyze your main paid search competitors:
  • See how much they’re spending on paid traffic.
  • Check which keywords they’re bidding on.
  • Study the composition of their ad copy.
  • See which URLs they are using to convert paid traffic.
  • Identify where competitors publish YouTube and display ad creatives. 

• Analyze new markets with the Market Explorer:
  • Discover total market traffic trends and competitors’ shares.
  • Reveal the top players in any market.

• Analyze competitor social media traffic sources:
  • Check audience size, posting activity, and engagement on each channel.
  • Check their most engaging posts over a given time frame.
  • Run competitor comparisons on three metrics – audience, activity, and engagement.

• Analyze competitor audience insights:
  
  • Compare up to 5 domains so you can see which other websites (and their categories) have the highest audience overlap % and inform you who your competitors are, who to form content partnerships with, or where to place ads.

Not to mention, Semrush is an all-in-one digital marketing platform used by 10M+ users, including Walmart, Samsung, and Vodafone. Today, 30% of Fortune 500 companies use Semrush as their go-to marketing solution.

So, if you want all your competitor analysis and digital marketing tools under one roof – this might be the platform for you.

Let’s take a look at four of its key toolkits:

The Traffic Analytics (aff) report is very powerful.

It’s like Similarweb and Google Analytics got together and had a baby. 

We all know you can dive into Google Analytics to check your traffic data, but how on earth do you check your competitors’ traffic?

Because Semrush can’t access every website’s internal analytics, it uses clickstream data to generate estimated traffic analytics reports so that you can see: 

• Which channels drive the most traffic.
• Which geographic locations send the most traffic across each channel.
• Which specific sites send the most referral traffic.
• Which subdomains or subfolders get the most visits.
• Which pages/posts pull in the most organic traffic.
• Which paid and organic keywords are driving traffic.
• Which social media channels (and content) drive the most traffic.
• How this traffic engages with a site across different devices.
• How metrics compare across different competitors.
• Analyze up to 200 sites in bulk from your custom list.

Using this level of competitor insight lets you build a traffic strategy with zero guesswork. 

The SEO Toolkit (aff) lets you analyze all areas of your competitors’ SEO strategy, including the keywords they rank for, their top traffic pages, and backlink profile.

Plus, you can look for new keyword opportunities with the Keyword Magic tool, monitor keyword rankings, and build white-label SEO reports.

Semrush has been voted the best SEO tool by hundreds of experts across a range of categories. The platform has an enormous database of over 23+ billion keywords that are accessible through several different integrated tools.

You can use the SEO Toolkit to:

• Identify a site’s top traffic subfolders, subdomains, and URLs.
• Identify which keywords drive the most organic traffic to a website.
• Perform keyword gap analysis across up to 5 competing sites.
• Analyze competitor backlink profiles to find their most powerful sources.
• Uncover quick-win featured snippet opportunities. 
• Monitor ranking performance across any device down to the zip code level.
• Analyze SERP volatility trends caused by potential algorithm updates.

The Advertising Toolkit (aff) gives you an unfair behind-the-scenes look at your competitors’ PPC campaign.

You can discover trends in how much paid traffic they’re getting, how many keywords they’re bidding on, and how much they’re spending over time.

You can use the Advertising Toolkit to:

• Identify which keywords competitors are bidding on and if they’re increasing spend over time.
• Discover which ad copies they’re using to win the click, and which ones have been in rotation the longest, to get insight into which ones are converting the best.
• Locate the landing pages they send traffic to so you can see how they’re converting the paid traffic.
• Analyze the competitor display creatives, and find which YouTube channels and videos they are running ads on.
• Perform PPC keyword gap analysis to find untapped paid traffic opportunities.

Semrush also provides a ton of other functionality, including technical site audits, on-page SEO analysis, content audits, social media tracking, rank tracking, log file analysis, and a host of other features.

It’s by far my #1 recommended Similarweb alternative for the sheer volume and quality of insight you get for the price.

You can analyze every inch of your competitors’ digital strategy, and manage your own and your clients’ digital marketing campaigns from start to finish with this one platform.

The Social Media Tracker (aff) Overview Report allows you to analyze the overall performance of all your competitors’ social media profiles. You can discover what is and isn’t working in terms of channels and content.

You can use the Social Media Tracker to:

• Check your competitors’ audience size, posting activity, and channel engagement.
• See what content your competitors are posting.
• Check their most engaging posts over a given time frame.
• Compare you and your competitors on three basic metrics – audience, activity, and engagement.
• Get weekly updates by email and create PDF reports.

Serpstat (aff) is an affordable Similarweb alternative that provides insights around a competitors’ organic and paid traffic.

But it doesn’t give you an overarching traffic strategy, like Semrush. 

For instance, you can’t see how much traffic competitors get from each channel – organic vs paid vs social vs referring sites – and then drill into specific referral websites, or look at the engagement metrics.

You can use Serpstat to:

• Identify which competitors’ pages rank for the most keywords.
• Find all the topics your competitors are using to drive traffic.
• Identify all the keywords competitors are bidding on in paid search.
• Discover which ads competitors are using for specific keyword groups.
• Reverse-engineer competitors to find their top backlink sources.
• Benchmark your site against competitors.

Editor’s note: Serpstat is a stripped-down, more affordable option than Semrush that gives you insights across a couple of channels. Check out my in-depth Serpstat review.

Ahrefs is a great tool for analyzing competitor organic traffic performance and performing competitor backlink analysis.

Plus, it has a nice user interface that makes it easy to navigate between reports. 

However, outside of organic search performance, it doesn’t provide the deeper traffic analysis capabilities across paid search, social, and referral sites like the Semrush Traffic Analytics report does. 

Plus, you can’t measure the engagement metrics (bounce rate, page visit duration, etc.) of other websites.

You can use Ahrefs to:

• Identify the top traffic generating subdomains, subfolder and pages on any site.
• Analyze competitor backlink profiles to find their top linked content, plus gaps that you could capitalize on.
• Discover which competitor keywords drive the most traffic.
• Find keyword and content gaps at the URL, subfolder, and subdomain levels to unearth new traffic opportunities.
• Uncover the most engaging content topics in a given industry or niche with the Content Explorer tool.
• Use the SERP overview report to accurately qualify keyword opportunities.
• Use Content Explorer to reverse engineer your competitors’ content strategy, including publishing frequency, content types, most engaged topics and social channels, and more.

Mangools (aff) is the most cost-effective and easy-to-navigate toolset in this list of sites like Similarweb. It’s ideal for beginners who are interested in getting a granular look at competitor organic traffic strategy only.

From Mangools 5-in-1 toolset, you can use:

• Site Profiler to check the high-level SEO authority of your competitors’ website, including their backlink profile and popular content, and discover audience demographics.
• SERPWatcher to track keyword rankings and their search volumes in any location and on any device for you and your competitors.
• KWFinder to get a more granular look at the keywords driving traffic to your competition, and also finding new low keyword difficulty opportunities.
• SERPChecker to help you qualify potential keyword targets with color-coded scores to identify the strongest and weakest competition.
• Link Miner to analyze the power of your competitors’ backlinks based on the Link Strength (LS) metric, and build lists of opportunities based on several metrics, including Majestic’s Trust and Citation Flow.

Editor’s note: Mangools has a narrow view that doesn’t provide insight into other major traffic channels, such as paid, social, and referral. Plus, there’s no engagement metrics.

SpyFu provides both organic and paid traffic analysis capabilities. 

You can search for any domain, including your competitors, to see where they’ve appeared on Google and which keywords they’ve ranked for, plus every keyword they’ve bought on Google Ads and how they’ve varied the ad copy. 

But it lacks the global traffic analysis capabilities of a tool like Semrush.

You can use SpyFu to:

• Identify the keywords that drive traffic and purchases for your competitors.
• Download your competitors’ most profitable organic keywords and add all of them to your campaigns.
• Analyze the keyword overlap your site has with up to three competitors, and discover the keywords you aren’t ranking for, but they are.
• Track your competitors’ paid search campaigns to see what’s working and what isn’t.
• Get recommendations on the most profitable keywords that you’re not already buying.
• Download your competitors’ most profitable ad keywords and add all of them to your campaigns.
• Track your organic and paid keyword ranking progress and impression share.
• Trace the keyword ranking history for any page or website to unearth the algorithm change or site optimization that caused their rise or fall. 

Conductor lets you research and track your competitors’ organic and paid traffic analysis capabilities. You can analyze your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, neutralize threats to your traffic sources, and unearth opportunities where you can get ahead.

You can use Conductor Competitive Intelligence to:

• Analyze your search market share by category, result type, rank position, location, device type, and more. 
• Take a deep dive with head-to-head comparisons of your biggest competitors.
• Analyze your competitors’ organic channel performance – review the top traffic-driving pages, identify what keywords they rank for, and see their recent gains and losses.
• Discover the keywords and topics where you can beat your competitors across devices and locations. 
• See where your competitors are spending ad dollars so that you can make informed decisions about your campaigns.
• Create reports to share competitive opportunities and wins across your organization.

Semrush is the best alternative to Similarweb.

It’s the only other tool on this list that allows you to analyze ALL traffic channels – organic, paid, social, and referral – and drill right the way down to the keyword or specific referring site, while also retrieving engagement metrics across different devices. 

For digital marketers, agencies and larger brands, Semrush eliminates all the guesswork when it comes to building a successful multi-channel digital marketing strategy. The insights will save you countless hours, reduce wasted ad spend, and as result, ensure the platform pays for itself many times over each month. 

If you want to compare Semrush to Similarweb, take advantage of one of the extended free trial links below: