Even before you started your business, you were already monitoring your competitors in other areas of your daily doings. Monitoring your competitors is a nice way of knowing what your business competitors are doing, and what they aren’t doing, and using these findings to your advantage.
Observing your competitors’ online marketing strategies is a nice way of weighing their strengths and weaknesses and using them to improve your business. The first step into doing a solid online analysis of your competitors’ strategy is identifying who the main competitors are.
After you have established who they’re, you can start to monitor and analyze their tactics. Here are five simple ways to monitor your business competitors.
1. Keywords analysis
All good search marketing campaigns are built on keywords. This is why you need to do keyword research to know how your competitors rank and how much traffic they get from a particular set of keywords.
Competitive keyword analysis is among the best ways to stand out and gain an advantage over competitors in this crowded online space. You can use some free and paid tools to find those keywords that are mostly used by your competitors to gain traffic.
These tools will reveal the main keywords your competitors target in their paid and organic searches. Once revealed, you’ll know which keywords they’re missing and use them in your marketing campaigns.
2. Monitoring with Ahrefs
Evaluating your business competitors’ link profile is also vital to your online marketing success. This evaluation can help you identify areas in your online marketing strategy that need improvement.
You can use some tools to analyze your competitors’ links, including Ahrefs, which has made monitoring your competitors’ backlinks easier and convenient.
Although their primary focus is on content and SEO analysis, you can also use this tool to analyze backlinks. By doing this, you’ll get insight about which pages on your competitor’s site are giving them the most backlinks. With over 192 billion pages in their database, Ahrefs have got the largest index of backlinks.
3. Usage of Spokeo
By monitoring the posts and social channels of your competitors using reverse phone lookup and phone number search tools, you will gain insight into their online activities. These activities include what they’re sharing, their best-performing topics and how they are talking to their customers.
This can be done using Spokeo, a reverse phone lookup tool that organizes public records, social network information and white pages listings into simple profiles that will help you to learn about your competitors.
Apart from tracking everything your competitor is posting on social networks, you can use Spokeo to monitor your competitors’ blog and online activity.
4. Researching the content
You can also search for your competitors most shared content by brand, topic, or even location. You can use a particular set of keywords to find out how your business competitors rank and how popular they are in search engines. This allows you to know your competitors’ performance and also identify a set of new competitors you hadn’t known of their existence.
Additionally, researching your competitor’s content is a great tool for noticing their best articles and blog content produced by your competitors. You can do the analysis using several free and paid tools.
5. Tracking links and backlinks
Apart from tracking your competitors’ social mentions and names, you should also consider tracking their backlinks. This is because SEO and Website traffic relies on backlinks. You can use a set of online free tools to track any new links your competitors are getting. These tools have link alert functionalities that will notify you every time your competitors gain new links.
You can also uncover specific content that’s performing well by using these backlink checking tools. They will provide you with lots of information including a list of domains that linking to a particular image or article, which will allow you to build a potential list of your links for any similar content.
Conclusion
Monitoring your business competitors is very vital for any online marketing strategy. From tracking their keywords to using Spokeo to monitor their blog and social media posts, analyzing your competitor regularly will help you remain a step ahead in your industry. Keeping an eye on your competitors’ online activities is the only way of ensuring your web content remains stronger and stands out from the rest.
Valerie Malecha is a content writer for Spokeo. She has a great experience in marketing, travel, business and relationship sphere.