Any marketing strategy should include keeping track of your direct competition. In reality, most business owners believe that following their competitors’ top spots in Google is enough to keep an eye on them. It also helps to follow them to benefit your online reputation.

While keeping an eye on your competitors’ rankings is essential for anticipating a traffic gain or loss, it’s rarely a feasible strategy. What are you going to do if your competitor’s page starts to rise in the search engine results pages (SERPs)? I am a firm believer in actionable roadmaps (i.e., marketing tactics that trigger or inspire some action on your part).

While I don’t think it’s a bad idea to keep an eye on your competitors’ rankings, I believe you should do a lot more to assess their success or failure and take action quickly.

Keep an eye on the landing pages of your competitors.

You’re probably keeping an eye on the SERP activities of some of your competitors’ pages. You’ll probably notice if one of those pages’ rankings declines or rises. But how are you expected to figure out what’s causing the dip or spike? The correct answer is to keep an eye on their on-page SEO since you were monitoring them anyhow.

Has your rival altered the page’s title tag? Have they gone over the page with a fine-toothed comb? Is there a video or an image that they’ve added or removed? Is the page structure different now? None of this will cause an immediate change in rankings, but it may do so over time, and you won’t know unless you notice it.

It’s a good idea to keep an eye on your competitors’ SEO maintenance strategies (i.e., how they maintain their existing pages) to predict their SERP changes.

Visualizing is a one-of-a-kind application that keeps track of any visual or text changes made to any website. The tool includes some fun settings to play with, such as monitoring the page from a mobile device or a particular country. You can also choose to watch only a portion of the page, which is helpful if some of it is static (for example, if you want to monitor your competitor’s Twitter bio but don’t want to be notified every time they post a new tweet).

You may fine-tune your alerts over time to only notify you of specific changes (keywords added, etc.). You may also build a separate email filter for these notifications to properly archive them and quickly locate the date when a specific page occurred.

Keep an eye on your competitors’ backlinks.

Links are still an essential factor in deciding how Google ranks websites. A newly gained high-quality backlink from a reputable resource may not immediately increase a page’s ranks, like on-page factors. Still, it will most likely help to improve positions gradually.

As a result, determining which of those backlinks may have influenced your competitor’s organic rankings is quite challenging. However, if you are notified as new links are gained, you will be able to determine which ones are influencing the situation.

Another compelling reason to monitor your competitors’ backlinks is this: You’ll be able to see what they’re doing to create ties. Link building is complex, and natural link development is much more difficult these days; therefore, using your competitors’ experience is an excellent idea.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s not about copying your competitors’ links. It’s all about utilizing them as a learning tool:

• What types of material do your competitors produce to gain links, and what works best for them?

• Who are your competitors’ promoters, and can you persuade them to support you?

• Do your competitors employ any low-quality link-building strategies, and if so, what effect do they have on their rankings?

Competitive backlink monitoring can provide answers to a variety of questions.

Link Assistant includes a neat “alerts” feature that may be used to warn you of newly discovered links referring to your competition, among other things.

You must first build a new project for your most successful and active competitor to create an alert. Then, anytime your competition gets a new backlink, you’ll need to set up a new email alert. It’s pretty useful! A few different link checkers provide link alerts, so look into all of your alternatives.

Keep an eye on your competitors’ dissatisfied customers.

Finally, the consumers and followers of your competitors will tell you a lot about what is wrong with their organization.

Although this form of monitoring is not strictly related to SEO, it will assist you in avoiding your competitors’ mistakes, anticipating their impending reputation crisis, and learning how to develop your product to fill a gap in your target market. In essence, this monitoring establishes a vital link between SEO and sales by allowing the two teams to work together to outperform the competition.

Twitter is a wonderful tool to keep track of public debates, and the platform allows for “emotional” searches, which are tweets that contain the symbols 🙂 or :(.

All you have to do is look for “brand name :(” on Twitter to identify anyone talking about that brand and expressing dissatisfaction with it.

Another excellent approach to keep track of that search is Tweetdeck, which has a dedicated column.

Agorapulse is a fantastic third alternative because its monitoring tool includes sentiment analysis and allows you to limit results based on a negative statement.

Conclusion

Competition monitoring is a crucial component of any marketing plan since it allows you to make more informed marketing decisions. However, choose your competition carefully to follow.

Amazon, for example, competes with roughly half of the eCommerce companies I’ve encountered. However, keeping an eye on Amazon is unlikely to be beneficial. The platform does not need to do anything to get backlinks (publishers link to it since they are familiar with the brand), and it is so large that it ranks simply because Google trusts it.

A less established and newer company actively marketing would be a better pick. Identify a fast-growing niche competition to keep an eye on what they’re doing and learn from someone ambitious and inventive. Best of luck in improving your online reputation!