If you don’t know how to beat Shopify competitors, how can you expect to win?
A successful Shopify store requires competitor analysis.
It doesn’t matter if you are looking for inspiration, information or insight, it is important to understand how Shopify merchants who have been the most successful stay ahead of the rest.
- Which are their most popular products?
- From where are their traffic buyers coming from?
- Which keywords are they targeting
- What makes their site rank higher than yours?
- What pricing strategies do they use to price similar products?
How can you spy on Shopify competitors to find the information you need?
This article will show you 11 ways to spy on Shopify competitors, without taking up too much of your time.
Some methods can be free while others require paid apps. These methods will help you become more aware of the Shopify stores within your market, what they are doing, and what you can do to keep up.
SEMRush
SEMRush is described as an “all in one marketing toolkit”, and it is. It focuses heavily on search engine marketing.
It offers both small and large Shopify stores the ability to conduct in-depth competitor analyses.
This tool allows you to:
- Analyze SEO strategies of competitors
- Analyze backlinks of competitors
- Analyze competitor content strategy
- Analyze the traffic to any store
- Discover paid search strategies and the Google Display Network
- Check out the landing pages and copy of competitors’ ads
- Analyze Google Shopping Campaigns
- Analyze your competitors on social media
- Identify market leaders, established players, and game-changers
This will allow you to emulate the best SEO strategies and find gaps in the market.
This tool can be used to spy on Shopify competitors. You can also use SEMRush for:
- Run SEO audits
- Keep track of daily rankings
- Keyword research
SimilarWeb
Pricing: Available in a free version Pricing for Enterprise Application
SimilarWeb is a brand that “innovatively markets intelligence solutions” to empower businesses to make better business decisions.
It also includes a suite of tools that can be used to spy on Shopify competitors using deep market analysis and competitor analysis.
This will help you to market map and benchmark, channel acquisition, track customer behavior, optimize your funnel, and optimize it.
You can, in particular:
- To discover new opportunities, compare website performance with competitors
- Monitor market share and growth over the course of time
- Map the market’s key players
- Understanding the changes in category visits, engagement, and marketing channels
- To better understand funnel leakage, and to improve performance, uncover conversions from other stores
- Find the marketing channels that have the highest conversion rates
- Get visibility on the most-viewed content from competitors
- Get 36 months of data for QoQ, MoM and YoY analyses
Ahrefs
Prices: $99-$999 per month for agencies The Standard and Lite plans offer a $7 trial.
Ahrefs offers a range of SEO tools for Shopify store owners, but the Site Explorer tool is what we are most interested in to spy on Shopify competitors.
This will allow you to “get a detailed look at the organic traffic and backlink profile for any URL or website.”
The most successful ecommerce websites get lots of organic search traffic for relevant keywords.
Search results that rank higher than you are costly. This is the bottom line. You must do all you can to improve them and get a piece of their traffic.
Ahref Site Explorer actually combines three SEO competitor analysis tools into one:
- Search engine traffic research: Find out which keywords are being used by your competitors and which pages generate the most traffic.
- Backlink Checker: Identify which websites link to your competitor’s sites and assess the quality of their backlink profiles.
- Paid Traffic (PPC), research to find out if your competitors are using paid search advertising and how they channel their traffic.
These tools give you a 360-degree overview of your competition. This tool considers both paid and on-page SEO.
BuiltWith
Pricing: For individual site searches, pricing is not charged. Paid versions cost between $295 and $950 per month.
BuiltWith looks beyond search engine optimization and performance to find out what is driving the success of a store.
This tool will help you identify what is driving your competitors’ websites and what drives them to sales. It also shows you what you can do in order to catch up.
BuiltWith has index key information on more than 370 million websites, including your competitors.
Enter the URL of Shopify competitor that you wish to examine and you’ll get detailed results.
- Mobile shoppers are well catered for in the store
- These widgets are used to make the store look great and work well.
- How they speed up the website
- It uses a content delivery network
- The content management system
- It used analytics and tracking tools to monitor customer behavior
- How they monetize the store including the payment gateways
- Their advertising technology
- Their web hosting and email providers
- Security elements (SSL certificates, etc.)
- The store uses server technology
BuzzSumo
Pricing: $79 – $299 per month. All plans come with a 7-day free trial
What do your competitors do to create content that is similar to what you are targeting?
Content is the king. If your competitors are creating better content around your target keywords, it makes sense that they will rank higher on organic search than yours.
BuzzSumo explains how they do it using inbuilt tools like:
- Reports on content analysis – Browse a large index of social engagement data and find the best content
- Domain reports – Compare and Analyze domains to Benchmark Social Content Performance
- Topic Explorer – Start with a keyword to generate content ideas
- Search for Influencers – Find influencers to work with
- Backlink analysis – see which websites link to key domains or competitor sites
- Question Analyzer – Find the most frequently asked questions about your products
- YouTube Analyzer – Learn what works in video marketing within your niche
- Top Author Search – Find the most influential and active authors in your region
BuzzSumo allows you to identify the most-performing keywords and the type of content that ranks highest, as well as the places it has been shared, how many times it was shared and by who.
It allows you to identify brands and individuals that are targeting your keywords, so you can either partner (in the case if they are influencers) with them or outrank them.
BuzzSumo is a great tool to help you improve your content and rank higher in search engines.
Mention
Pricing: Starting at FREE, up to $450+/month for Enterprise
Mention allows brands and agencies to monitor the internet, listen to their audiences and manage social media.
It not only allows you to monitor and track competitors brands, but also allows you to manage you own online reputation.
The principal purpose of spying on Shopify competitors is to identify areas of weakness and uncover opportunities for you.
Mention offers in-depth brand intelligence as well as the following analysis features for competitors:
- Monitor how competitors reach their target market and engage with them
- Learn how they build relationships with shoppers/influencers.
- Find out the complaints of their customers or the reasons they are satisfied with high levels of satisfaction
- To find the best geographic positions to market, monitor mentions.
- You can identify all mentions of brands. This will allow you to reach customers from your competitors and offer better solutions.
Shopify Spy Tools
Xpareto
Xpareto doesn’t hide its purpose.
Its homepage boasts “Spy on top-rated ecommerce shops.” You can now reverse engineer these winners to duplicate their success.
This tool is free and simple. This tool allows you to analyze the success factors of your competitors’ stores.
This tool is especially useful for Shopify store owners who are just starting out and want to gain insight into different ecommerce business models.
It is easy to use
- In the search box, type the store name or URL.
- Check out the daily traffic and rating of the store
- Click the link to see the top-selling products in the store
- If your store uses Facebook ads you can view the most recent campaign ad
This tool can only do limited analysis, but it is free and very useful, especially for those who are looking to target Facebook ads or which products to focus on when you dropshipping.
Shopify Inspector
https://www.shopifyinspector.com/
Shopify Inspector, a Google Chrome extension, is the “ultimate source for competitive intelligence about ecommerce shops”.
You can gather information on competitors by using data:
- Discover the hottest new products in product launches
- Bestsellers – Find out which products are the most popular
- Pricing Comparison – Compare how similar products are priced
- Traffic – Monitor where traffic is coming from
- Get real-time sales statistics – see weekly revenue figures as well as sales figures for specific products
- Advertising campaigns – See which ads are most effective
- Technology – Find out which apps they use and do not use
Shopify Inspector has almost 1,000,000 Shopify stores indexed. You can easily access the information from other stores with just a few clicks.
This tool will help you find the secrets of success in other stores and provide insight that you can use to improve your store’s performance.
Previews Facebook Ads
Sometimes your best tool is your research skills.
Your strongest Shopify competitors may be using Facebook ads. If they’re doing it well, they may be taking your business away.
Although there are many tools available to help you research Facebook advertising, we believe that the best way to do so is to go to the Facebook ads page for the company in question.
First, go to the Facebook ad library here: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library
Enter the Shopify store name and click All ads. As shown in the above image, it will show you previews of all ads for this business.
It will tell you when the ad began running. If you click on View Ad Details, you can see the actual ad as seen in customer feeds.
This is a great way for you to reverse engineer the ads from successful stores and make your Facebook ads more effective.
You can reverse engineer the landing pages by clicking through the ads. Remember that landing pages are just as important as the ads.
GTMetrix
Site speed is critical for customer experience in your store, as well as Google.
Google uses page load speed as a ranking metric and you could be penalized for slow-loading pages.
GTMetrix, a free tool that will help you “See what your site does, show why it’s slow, and identify optimization opportunities.”
You can also use it to test the speed of comparable Shopify shops.
This tool might help you to understand why your search results are outranking yours.
If speed is a problem, you can take steps to make your store faster for users and Google.
Google is another great resource for researching your competitors.
Google Alerts, for example, allows you to monitor virtually any online activity. An alert was created for “MVMT watches” in the example above. This will create alerts each day with all the latest news and mentions about MVMT watches online.
Google Alerts can track any keywords or brand names you choose.
If you don’t have the budget to use Mention, this is an inexpensive way to track your competitors.
You can also search for competitors by simply typing their name into Google, but preferably without using terms such as “Shopify website”.
You can also enter the site name:myshopify.com and your key phrase or keywords into the Google search box. This will list all Shopify stores relevant to your keyword. This should help you identify key competitors.
Start going after your Shopify competitors
Shopify competitors come from many different backgrounds.
- Competitors who sell similar or identical products (you both sell jeans for women)
- Indirect competitors who offer a different product but target the exact same customers as you (you sell jeans for women and they sell jeans for women)
You will need to identify the type of competitor you are trying to target in order to determine which method you use to track them down and investigate their activities.
Are you ready to:
- Identify the key players
- How can you identify industry trends?
- Reach out to your audience.
- Compare pricing?
- How can you improve your market reputation?
- Set benchmarks for your service
- How can you improve your search ranking?
- How can you identify market gaps?
You can get a competitive edge by using any of the above methods.
Many paid tools come with free trials. The free tools are very useful and sometimes you can’t beat your own research and insights.
Determine the information you require about which competitors, and then go after them.
It’s important.
