Are you looking for new ways to save time doing research and competitive analysis?
Then these five handy SEO tools and plugins – which are completely free to use – should help:
- Competitor research: Wayback Machine
- Data analysis: Copy Selected Links
- Design and layout: GoFullPage
- Research and data formatting: Docs Online Viewer
- Reformat content from an image: OneNote
1. Competitor research: Wayback Machine
The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is one of the most underrated free tools for SEO. Not only can you use it to view past versions of your own website, but you can also use it to view competitor changes.
There are probably hundreds of tools and approaches for competitive SEO analysis, like Fluxguard and Visualping. But the Wayback Machine is free and can be used on any site. And it can’t easily be blocked by a competitor’s firewall (yes, your competitor can block IPs coming through your company’s VPN).
You can view past versions of competitor pages to see what they’ve updated, tested and reverted, like:
- Design and layout elements
- Calls to action (CTAs)
- Content and headline changes
- Keyword focus
Web Archives also has extensions for all the major browsers that let you instantly view versions of any page you’re on.
When to use it
- Spot and track trends over time, or come up with ideas to test on your own site.
- Use the Changes tab to see how much a page has changed over time. It can give you clues if competitors seem to update certain pages on a regular timeline.
- For sites that use a category or folder structure, the Sitemap tab lets you see a visual map of the structure of the site. This is especially useful for sites without an obvious or public sitemap.
- Share before and after screenshots if you can’t access previous versions of your page.
When you can’t use it
The Wayback Machine has one major downside: You can’t view a page that hasn’t been archived before.
The Wayback Machine doesn’t have a record of every webpage, though it does come pretty darn close.
The Archive claims it has 813 billion web pages in its collection. With an estimated 4.5 billion indexed webpages in existence, that’s about 18% of the whole internet.