Competition is something every enterprise has to live with and monitor. No matter the size of your businesses it's important to keep one eye on your competition. In the past we could only monitor competition on face value, such as their ad campaigns, what they push out via PR and pricing strategies but in digital marketing, we've got access to a lot more than that.

In a time, when a digital is so important and detailed, and the Internet has grown so extensively, you have tons of different factors to consider when spying on your competition. Keeping a bench mark and making sure they're not eating in your market share or growing faster than you can help you build a proactive, not reactive marketing strategy.

Keeping your competitors closer

In many cases, tools that help you monitor your own web performance also can help you gather data on your competition. So, you might be familiar with some of these tools already and with a little analysis you can put together a complete competitor tracking dashboard

1. Track how fast their site loads

This is becoming more and more important in a mobile driven world, Google has stated that page load speed is a key ranking factor and there's plenty of research to prove that if you have a lazy loading site you're going to lose customers. Speed will continue to be key, so to bench mark yourself against competitors try Googles page speed tool and see how you match up. Check out the Google Page speed tool

2. Track which tags they're using

Ghostery gives you the control to make informed decisions about the personal data you're competitors are tracking on their site. See what kind of tracking tools they're using, scripts they're running and the speed at which these tools are loading. This sort of report can help you find ways to one up competitors by using better tracking or implementing it in a more optimised way.

Note: Ghostery can also be installed as a browser plugin that remains active on every website your visit.

Check out Ghostery

3. Track what content is most popular

BuzzSumo has to be one the most important tools that you can use for content marketing and SEO, but what many don't realise is that it's great for competitor analysis. Simply enter your competitor's site to find out what content is most popular on social media, who their key influencers are and how much reach they're getting from their content marketing efforts.

Check out Buzzsumo

4. Track where they're getting links from

There are many link tracking tools out there but I've found that SEO profiler's free version can give you quite a bit of insight into your link profile and even better it can provide you with the same insights on your competitor's site. Simply run a scrape of your competitor's sites to find out where they're getting their links from, the types of links they're getting and which links are most important to their site. Once you have that kind of data, time to sneak up behind them and grab a link on these sites too, there are usually a few hidden gems in every competitor site audit.

Check out SEO profiler

5. Track their channel performance

Similar web is a powerful website traffic comparison tool that allows you to not only view estimated traffic figures of your competitor's sites, but breaks it down for you per channel so you can see which channels they are stronger in and which channels they're lagging behind in. It's great for getting an overview of their digital marketing efforts month on month with the free version giving you a reasonable amount of insight.

Check out Similar web

6. Track their Facebook performance

LikeAlyzer will do a quick health check of any Facebook page. The tool is commonly used for competitive research because it doesn’t require access to Facebook Insights to do its magic, and the features are uniform across pages. LikeAlyzer is excellent when you want to perform a quick check on your page, but you’ll get the most benefit from it if you use it to analyse multiple competitors. Pay close attention to suggestions the tool spits out for other pages to determine where your brand can step up and take the lead.

Check out Likealyzer

7. Track their social influence

Social Mention allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web's social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc. So anything your competitor does in the social sphere from owning hashtags, topics, brand terms will be right at your fingertips. You'll even get a ranking of how positive or negative sentiments around the brand are, pretty neat don't you think?

Check out Social Mention

8. Track their keywords

SEMrush has been a popular keyword tracking tool for years and offers some really helpful competitor keyword reports. Simply enter your competitor's site and get a host of keyword related information form keywords they rank for, the volume of searches for that keywords, the URL ranking for that keywords, the competition for the keyword, the cost and the trend behind each keyword all absolutely free.

Check out SEMrush

9. Track their internal linking, keyword density and long form content

Probably the Excalibur to any SEO screaming frog has built up a cult following with its powerful crawling tool. You're able to scrape a competitors site and find what keywords they're using in their title, meta descriptions, how many words they use per page and even how many times they link internally to each page. When you're in a competitive organic market these metrics are key in finding ways to better optimise your site vs your competitors.

Check out Screaming Frog

Note: The free version only works on sites that are smaller than 500 pages

10. Get a website overview

If you're not keen on all the deep diving and just want a broad overview of what your competitors are doing then I suggest checking out woo rank, it pulls together a range of data from traffic, to SERP views, backlinks, social trends, server downtime and much more.

Check out Woorank

Sneak up on the competition

Now that you know how to get better insights on what your competitors are doing, how do you think it will change the way you run your businesses? Is it just a nice to know or will you be using the data proactively? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Tags: How to, Tools