Why and how to monitor competitors’ activities?

Why is it important?

Competition is worth analyzing for many reasons. The two most important are:

• Using the mistakes of the competition to take its place in the organic results of the search engine,
• Optimization of your own website

One connects with the other. The better we optimize the website, the more likely it is to display in higher than competition.

Learn from the mistakes of others, imitate the best

Regular analysis of the competition avoids many failures. Have you noticed that a competitor is in trouble? Follow all of their activities on the Internet. Try to identify what is right and what is wrong. Draw conclusions that can help you in your business.

Avoid the mistakes made by the competition. Try to implement solutions that seem to be producing good results. Do not be afraid of imitation. Learning from the better than yourself is one of the easiest ways to develop your own enterprise.

By observing the competition, you can save not only valuable time (you do not have to test everything yourself), but also a lot of money.

Who to follow?

You definitely know who your competitors are. However, that doesn’t mean you have to keep track of everyone. Choose preferably 3-4 companies. Analyzing more numbers may already be difficult for you and distract you too much from your own side. You have to get it right. Of course, the more data, the more accurate and reliable the conclusions.

It is worth observing at least one company that leads the way, is a leader in your industry. It is from them that you will learn about the best solutions. The material for analysis will also be provided to you by a company that is doing worse on the market than you. Here, in turn, it is worth observing what is better not to implement in your business.

The last thing – the companies you are competing with for search engine rankings are your most direct competitors. You need to know about them in order to gain an advantage over them.

How and what to analyze?

Anyone who knows at least a little about SEO knows how important it is for a website to get valuable links. Have a look at how the competitions do it. In this case, a tool such as Ahref (unfortunately a paid tool) will work well. This way you find out where your competitors are getting their links from. You may be able to use these resources yourself.

Other tools for analyzing competitors are Semstorm, Senuto, Majestic SEO, SEO for Firefox and SEO SpyGlass. These tools will allow you to get information with whom you are fighting for positions in the organic search engine results, as well as which keywords are common to both of you.

The tools will tell you whose activities you should be particularly vigilant about and how your website compares to these companies (in terms of visibility in the search engine). Links, keywords and position in organic search engine results are not all elements that need to be analyzed. Also carefully follow the content on the competition’s website and its positioning process. Note how they are written and what topics they relate to. Get started with Buzzsumo. The tool will show you which articles are currently the most popular among users. It will be a valuable source of information and inspiration for you. In addition, look for other factors (internal and external) that may affect the high position of a competing website in the search engine.

Sometimes it is not worth fighting, it’s better to... let go

Fighting with the competition for selected keywords is not always a good way. It is often better to look for alternative and easier-to-obtain traffic sources. What we mean is first of all, the Long tail method. Long teil is the positioning of a website for hundreds of multi-segment keywords with a different variety and number (top, most frequently searched phrases are omitted).

Thanks to the huge number of selected words, the traffic obtained is large and, as a result, much more profitable than in the case of phrases already heavily used by competitors. Of course, Long tail is not the only way to bring potential customers to your website and avoid the competition.

Content marketing, Internet monitoring

Regularly publishing high-quality content on the web is currently one of the most used ways to increase website traffic and obtain high positions in search engines.

By writing valuable content for your readers:

– you build your expert brand,
– you engage your audience,
– your content is readily shared,
– you attract new people interested in your offer,
– you appear in the search engine for more queries,
– you improve the position of your website in the organic search engine results.

All of the above benefits come down to one, the most important point – you get more customers, and thus you earn more.

Check which articles are most popular with your competitors. Don’t be afraid to write on the same topics. You will surely find readers.

In addition, start monitoring the Internet. Tools such as SentiOne or Brand24 will help you with this. Check what your customers write about your competition on an ongoing basis. Take their comments into account when optimizing your own offer. Try to capture the most unhappy users.

Do you want someone to do it for you?

Do you think there is too much of it and you can’t do it yourself? Use the help of an experienced SEO agency.

Competition analysis is one of the fundamental points in a website audit. A good agency will know how to approach it, will easily interpret the results obtained and will develop the most advantageous strategy for you.

Are you looking for such an agency? Contact us!