Analyzing rivals’ rankings in natural search outcomes can uncover content material and backlink alternatives. Step one is figuring out the pages to investigate. By site visitors? Engagement? Backlinks?
Listed here are three instruments to assist.
Semrush: Pages by Site visitors
Semrush tracks web page site visitors for any area from a number of sources — natural and paid search, social media, e-mail, and show advertisements. It’s numerous competitor knowledge to analysis.
Sort a site, load the info, and proceed to “Site visitors Evaluation” > “High Pages.” The report is sorted by “Site visitors share,” i.e., the share of complete area visits to every web page.

Sort a site, load the info, and proceed to “Site visitors Evaluation” > “High Pages.” Click on picture to enlarge.
You may:
- Restrict the report back to a rustic
- Filter by system and interval, as much as two prior years.
- Determine pages with essentially the most site visitors up to now month.
- Type by site visitors supply.

Restrict the report back to a rustic and filter by system, timeframe, and extra. Click on picture to enlarge.
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The instance under is sorted by “Referral site visitors” — pages with site visitors from different websites. These websites are backlink alternatives.

“Referral site visitors” lists pages with site visitors from different websites. Click on picture to enlarge.
Sorting the report by natural site visitors identifies pages for potential rating alternatives, equivalent to new key phrases to focus on.
The “Insights” part on prime of the report exhibits “Spiked” and “Trending” pages, these with declining and rising site visitors.
Buzzsumo: Pages by Engagement
Buzzsumo is useful for researching rivals’ content material advertising ways. The instrument’s “Content material Analyzer” report exhibits all pages from any area which have generated a number of:
- Fb reactions, feedback, shares,
- Twitter shares,
- Pinterest shares,
- Reddit upvotes and feedback.
The report additionally exhibits the variety of hyperlinks to a web page. In my expertise, Buzzsumo’s index is smaller than Semrush’s or Ahrefs’, nevertheless it (helpfully) focuses on in-content hyperlinks, these from articles.
The report is sorted by “Complete engagements” and contains an “Evergreen rating” for every URL, indicating a web page’s engagement progress after the primary few days.
Customers can filter the Content material Analyzer report by date vary, helpful for analyzing new or dated articles so far as 5 years again. An e-mail alert function can set off when a competitor publishes a brand new article.

Filter the Content material Analyzer report by date vary to investigate new or dated articles. Click on picture to enlarge.
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Every web page contains key metrics equivalent to complete engagements, dominant Fb reactions, prime shares, and backlinks.
Ahrefs: Pages by Referring Domains
Ahrefs’ “High Content material” report ranks all pages on a site or subdomain by the variety of referring domains and complete shares throughout Twitter, Fb, and Pinterest. Type the report by “Publication date” to search out new content material.

Ahrefs’ “High Content material” report ranks all pages by the variety of referring domains and complete shares on Twitter, Fb, and Pinterest. Click on picture to enlarge.
Clicking “Particulars” subsequent to every URL exhibits its backlinks and anchor textual content of these hyperlinks.
The report identifies essentially the most linked content material of any website. It’s also helpful to trace the correlation between shares and hyperlinks. Analysis a competitor’s content material that generated each hyperlinks and social media shares. Seemingly these backlinks have been natural — i.e., generated virally.
Two separate Ahrefs studies determine a website’s most linked pages.
“Finest pages by incoming hyperlinks” ranks all pages from any area primarily based on exterior or inner backlinks — dofollow, nofollow, redirects — with filters by platform kind: blogs, ecommerce websites, message boards, wikis, and content material administration techniques.

“Finest pages by incoming hyperlinks” ranks all pages from any area primarily based on exterior or inner backlinks. Click on picture to enlarge.
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“Finest by hyperlinks’ progress” ranks any area’s pages by the variety of acquired backlinks in a day, week, or month.

“Finest by hyperlinks’ progress” ranks pages by the variety of acquired backlinks in a day, week, or month. Click on picture to enlarge.
Each studies enable looking for a phrase on a web page’s title or URL, useful for researching a cluster of pages on a subject.
All of Ahrefs’ studies facilitate researching rivals’ link-building methods.