Competitor monitoring is your gateway to decision-making and future-ready strategies. Unleash your business potential with the power of competitive intelligence. Start your competitor monitoring adventure now!
You are doing everything right, yet your competitors take the cake by ranking higher, driving more traffic, and generating more ROI than you. But how are they achieving that?
Competitor monitoring can help you figure out how. A healthy competition is a great way to constantly stay updated with current market trends and deliver innovative solutions that solve a problem. Your competitors, in fact, will encourage you to constantly look for better ways to improve the nature and quality of your business presence.
However, your competitor will not be out and open about what they are doing. Their secret sauce is always brewing, and you need to keep an eye on what is working for them and how you can include their ingredients into your recipe to gain a competitive edge. Let’s get started with learning how competitor monitoring works.
Competitor monitoring or competitor tracking is the process of researching and analyzing what your competitors are doing to be where they are right now, how the target audience perceives their brand, the messaging they are using to attract qualified leads, and how they are keeping up with the industry’s evolving requirements.
With effective and strategic monitoring, you will be able to understand your competitor’s approach to reaching your target audience and find creative, future-ready ways to drive traffic and ROI to your business.
It also helps your brand build an attractive and promising perception from your potential customers. Competitor monitoring works as a magical mirror, allowing you to look at your industry and understand what is happening in order to plan your next move. Strategic steps to track competitors can be the key to becoming an industry expert in your niche.
It is important to understand who your competitors are. This will give your competitor monitoring a direction and will help you build your own data library, consisting of every research, tracking, or analysis you have ever done. Your competitors are of two types:
These businesses offer a similar (or even the same) range of services as you are. Tracking and monitoring these businesses should be your priority as these businesses are running cutthroat competition with your business growth. Your customer today has many options and offerings, and they are likely to compare before making a final decision. When they find your offer to be worthy amongst others and value for money, they are most likely to choose your brand over others.
These are the businesses that offer different ranges of services but are catering to the same target market. These businesses are not competing with your business. Still, as they are tending to the same pool of potential customers, it is recommended to keep an eye on these businesses, which will give you ideas on new perspectives, ideas, and approaches. Furthermore, it will significantly broaden your view of the industry, helping your strategies evolve and giving them a creative face.
The collective benefits of monitoring and researching your competitors include:
Monitoring your competitors can be overwhelming and tricky without knowing where to start. You may end up spending countless hours researching and yet have no breakthrough. Time is of the essence, and you shouldn’t let it slip by not knowing where to start from.
While the first step is always to identify who you are competing with, the following steps must be done to ensure you are making the best use of your time, resources, and efforts to craft a ravishing strategy. Here are the steps you must follow to monitor your competitors smartly:
Identifying the keywords your competitors are using to reach their target audience through paid and organic efforts will give you a clear idea of the keywords to take into consideration. Avoid keyword cannibalism or rewriting their content pieces as your own.
Consider using keyword tools to identify the keywords they are targeting and ranking for. These tools also come with the feature to conduct a keyword gap analysis to help you identify the keywords your competitors are missing out on and include them in your strategy.
Furthermore, these tools can also help you find long tail keywords, LSI keywords, semantic terms, and negative keywords. Having a broad spectrum of keywords will help you create an all-around strategy that caters to different levels of audiences at the same time without your efforts coming across as pushy or synthetic.
Each keyword, when used strategically, can enhance the chances of a website ranking on search engines. When you conduct keyword research on your competitors, you can identify where they are putting their efforts and how they are investing their resources.
Certain SEO ranking tools will help track your SEO efforts against your competitors in real-time. This will give you a better perspective of how things are going and if your strategies are working out. However, it is important to understand that your SEO efforts will not start yielding results from day 1. It takes time for a web page to get indexed by the crawl bot.
Avoid refreshing your page frequently during this time with new, keyword-stuffed content. Instead, focus on providing valuable, innovative, and unique content that aims to solve a problem. Adhere to keeping your content to the point, easy to understand, and informative. Additionally, if you plan to use transactional, navigational, or broad match keywords, remember to find keywords that will help you decide the intent of your content.
Other keywords that you should consider identifying during the course of your include:
Researching the type of content your competitors share will help you understand the nature of content that works well for them. It will also help you analyze data and have your own records to get your own strategy started. For the same, it is always advised to watch the website (blogs, announcements, ebooks, or even newsletters) along with social media.
If they are present on any other channels, keep an eye out for what they post there as well. Knowing what your competitors are posting, when they are posting, the frequency at which they are posting, and the nature of their interacting target audience will help you curate your own content marketing strategy.
While you are in the process of collecting data, do keep the scope for creativity and innovation, as these traits will give a unique perspective to your brand, eventually making you stand out from the crowd.
Furthermore, when you have identified a pattern, you will also be able to decode many things, including why their current strategy is working and the touchpoints their strategy is missing out on.
Remember, there’s no such thing as a perfect crime, and there’s always evidence left behind by even the smartest of criminals. Look for these clues, and you will be able to find your way into the heart of your target audience.
Understanding your competitor’s content marketing calendar will enable you to think out of the box. It will help you understand how specific type of content they are producing within their niche. Through this, you will be able to categorize the nature of content your business can produce and if it will be received well by your target audience.
Google Alerts is an excellent way to set alerts for whenever your competitors are using a specific, targeted keyword. You will be amongst the first ones to know about the content published and will be able to make amends to your content marketing strategy and produce content that corresponds to their published content.
After some time, you will be able to predict the nature of the content they are producing and identify the type of content your business wants to produce. By balancing these, your content marketing strategy will have a wider approach and potential to attract more traffic to your website.
Link building is the protein bar for your SEO strategy. By identifying the backlinks your competitors are using, you will be able to identify key elements of their outreach strategy and get insights into the type of audience they are targeting and how they are placing their content for more online visibility.
Furthermore, you can also look at how their customers are responding to the content being published. Take the factors that made content likable into account and tone your content accordingly. The key here is to find your way around it without making your content strikingly similar to theirs. Backlinking is essential for your website to grow.
Considered to be a ranking factor, backlinking to a high domain authority website makes it easier for Google crawlers to identify your website as genuine and credible. On top of that, if your website is enriched with high-quality, intent-driven content, your chances of ranking higher increase significantly.
Any form of content your competitors are posting should be analyzed thoroughly. Right from the keywords, visual content used, and even the customer feedback in the form of comments, reposts, and reshares. At the end of the day, everyone is trying to make their target audience happy and feel content with the type of services or products their business is able to offer.
Social media has made brands more accessible than ever. If your competition is on social media, pay close attention to:
Whenever your competitors publish a blog or are sending out newsletters in email, consider subscribing to these and keep a constant watch on them. By doing this, you will be able to identify their methodology and approach for talking to their potential and existing customers. It will also help you understand the niche of the audience they are trying to reach out to and convert. Furthermore, knowing the spectrum of information your competitors offer will help you curate and update your strategy to improve the quality of content you publish and the messaging you follow.
Using competitor monitoring tools that are designed to help with effective tracking of competitors and research ensures you are getting the right information and insightful data and are able to keep an eye out for your competitors without wasting your own precious time. Here are some tools to consider:
These AI tools can supercharge your strategizing and competitor tracking significantly.
SEO competitive analysis is an effective way to understand how your competitors are getting their organic traffic and the range of SEO efforts they are using. These tools will also give you insights into where you are lacking and areas where you can sail.
Step 3: Now, click on the ‘Competitors’ tab
Step 4: The tool will now show the ranking trend and other important information about your competitors.
To smartly track competitors, the tool is highly efficient and practical in providing accurate, real-time data.
RankWatch’s AI assistance, LARA, will show a list of possible new competitors, their organic traffic, different SERP features that are getting targeted, and the ads they are running.
The RankWatch tool allows users to track an unlimited number of competitors. The assistant will show all the ranking keywords along with the ranking URLs, snippets your competitors are showing up on, and the average rank. The assistant filters all the information you might need to make the best of your competitor research.
Track your competitors on the parameters that you want to. Set key performance indicators that allow you to keep track of how your competitors are performing for factors that are important to you. Click on the ‘Table Settings’ and choose the parameters you want to look out for.
Understand and analyze what makes your ads dull and how your competitors always have an influx of customers. Here’s how:
Step 1: Click on the tab named ‘Ad Copies’
Step 2: Select your competitor’s name from the drop-down menu, and the ad copies they are using will appear.
Analyzing your competitor’s content will help you understand the nature of the content they are producing and how it is helping them attract more traffic. It will also help you find creative ways to improve your strategies and give them tough competition.
You need to outline the key metrics for close competitor monitoring to keep the view vast. This can make tracking and keeping an eye challenging and haphazard. Instead, consider tracking these KPIs:
Competitors’ SERP rankings: Where on the SERP are they ranking, which types of topics they are ranking high for, and subsequently, which topics they are trailing to rank for?
Competitors’ social media presence: To gain an understanding of how their social media strategy is unfolding, its alignment with their content strategy, and the results they are getting.
Competitors’ unsatisfied customers: Analyze their reviews to recognize where your competitors could be doing better and how you can cover the gap.
Monitor the FAQs: Track the questions the target audience asks about their business or to them. How will your brand answer these questions with solutions (in the form of service or product)?
Their PPC advertising strategy: To understand where they are placing their ads for maximum visibility and clicks and the key components of their ad copies.
Competitors’ backlink-building strategy: Identify where your competitors are getting their backlinks from and how they are utilizing them to scale higher on search engine rankings.
Competitors’ on-page efforts: Track the sections that were crawled by the bot and how it worked with your website.
Competitor monitoring is a great way to test the waters and start taking action to gain a competitive advantage. While you are constantly monitoring and analyzing their performance, strategies, and tactics, keep room for your own creativity and innovation to flow through. The purpose of competitor tracking is to have additional data (tried and tested type) to experiment with new ways to attract, nurture, and convert your target audience.
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