Track your competitors websites
The first time I spoke about the need to track your competitors websites must have been at least 15 years ago. I was surprised by the response I received, but it still surfaces today.
All those years ago, the business owner I was speaking to replied with “I focus on what I can control, not what I can’t”. It is, naturally, a good approach to have under most circumstances. However, it went wide of the mark in this instance.
The phrase is often repeated in a multitude of variances. Some businesses will say they don’t worry about their competitors. They’ll say they need to worry about what their own business is doing instead.
These approaches are well intended. Unfortunately, you cannot ignore your competitors websites when you’re discussing SEO, CRO or anything connected to them or your online strategy.
SEO and your competitors
I always recommend that clients track their competitors websites. That means I ask them for their main competitors and track them on their behalf.
The reason is very simple. The activities of your competitors online could have a profound impact on your own SEO strategy. However, it can also stifle some business plans from an early stage, or at least put an air of real-world reality on them.
Thinking that you can focus on your own SEO alone has a major problem to begin with. The first thing any SEO consultant or digital agency worth their salt is going to do will be to investigate what it is you’re targeting and how realistic those ambitions are. This takes me back to the client I mentioned at the beginning of this blog.
SEO budget differences
The client wanted to rank as highly as possible (top 3) for an incredibly competitive phrase, and not just regionally. They wanted top 3 on Google nationally. That brought them into direct competition with brands whose budgets were in another league to theirs. That is the dose of reality I spoke about.
The competitors were very well established with high domain authorities. You’d expect that to be the case when they’re spending hundreds of thousands of pounds every year on digital marketing. I had direct knowledge through a contact that one of them was spending well over £1 million on digital marketing. Approximately £105k of that was spent on SEO.
By comparison, the budget of my client was £12,500 – per annum. There are times when you just have to be very honest and transparent with clients. You cannot just take their money if their objective is unachievable. It is ethically and morally wrong, and it won’t do your reputation any favours.
I could argue that I could provide £12,500 of more effective SEO services than the competitor was receiving for £105,000. However, would that be realistic? Having a budget that is more than 8 times larger than that available from my client is significant. I also knew the company the competitor was using, and they weren’t a fly-by-night operator. They had SEO staff that knew how to do their jobs. While I’d happily go up against them on a level playing field (or even a severely sloped one), this was anything but that.
The competitor that begins to take SEO seriously
Another reason to track your competitors websites is for the day one of them begins to take SEO seriously. If you’ve had a competitor that you’ve ousted in rankings long ago, and you’ve almost dismissed them, things can change. If someone new comes into the business, or they assess their marketing, you need to know they’re going to challenge you.
I have seen this happen several times over my career. If you’ve dominated search for a considerable time, it can be easy to become complacent. Then, you notice that you’re no longer No.1 for “Widgets”, or you find that your enquiries are decreasing in volume and you’re not sure why.
Tracking competitors makes it very easy to spot when a previously digitally-dormant competitor comes to life and begin to pay for professional SEO services.
Competitors that launch new websites
I’ve seen competitors decide to invest in new websites, often aesthetically more appealing than my own client site. That doesn’t mean they’ll rank higher, but it does show a willingness to revisit their digital investment.
Tracking competitor sites will always reveal the slightest of changes, so a major change such as a new site stands out like a sore thumb.
In my experience, a new website doesn’t necessarily mean that a competitor is about to engage in SEO. However, it makes it more likely. If they’ve been advised by their digital agency, there is always a chance they’ll take their advice and begin to have a stronger digital strategy.
Competitors beginning to obtain Google traction
Above all else, tracking your competitor websites will reveal when they begin to obtain traction with major search engines. That could indicate several things:
- They might begin to catch you (or might have already)
- They’re tracking your website or other competitors
- They’ve invested in SEO
- New investment in other digital marketing campaigns
The last one on that list is something we’ve not covered. Digital marketing extends well beyond SEO and could result in increased organic authority for a variety of reasons.
Firstly, if they’ve engaged the services of a PR company they could be getting press, and subsequently backlinks, that increase the authority of their site and the visibility of it.
Secondly, they could be using PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaigns to bring brand visibility and that can have a waterfall effect on their organic rankings (as customers and sites link to them).
There are other reasons that progress could be made in rankings, but the point is that tracking your competitors websites will give you the heads-up.
In-depth tracking of competitor websites
How you choose to react to competitor website activity is an altogether different matter to finding out about it.
It is the moment in time when the business leader gets to make a choice. That’s a choice they’d not have had if they adhered to the old adage of not focusing on what competitors are doing.
Most good SEO consultants will offer clients the opportunity to track competitor websites. The systems used to do this, at least the ones that do it well, are expensive. However, the information you can glean from them can be transformative in respect of the power they give you to adapt your SEO strategy if you need to. They’re an essential SEO tool in my trade.
Few clients tend to understand that the process of monitoring competitors websites is as in-depth and insightful as I see every day. However, why should they if they’ve never been offered the opportunity or seen the advantages in the past?
SEO tools and systems used to track competitor websites
I’m not talking simply about tracking your keyword target positions in SERPS (Google rankings). That can be done very easily and cheaply. No, I mean tracking what is actually happening on competitor websites in a way that is almost identical to the tracking and monitoring of your own site.
Tools such as Semrush and Ahrefs are the choice of most SEO professionals, with Moz being another popular choice. They’re also the tools that are likely to be used to track your own website.
What type of competitor website data can you get?
You’ll discover when new content is added, new products, pages and much more. Building up a picture of what the competitor company is aiming for online is relatively straight forward. I’m not suggesting you invest huge amounts of your digital marketing time into investigating this data, either as the client or the SEO professional, but you certainly shouldn’t ignore it.
The professional SEO systems don’t tell you that the competitor is targeting “X, Y and Z”, it isn’t quite as simple as that. However, they give you sufficient data to be able to come to accurate conclusions if you know how to interpret the information.
It is a proactive measure to prevent you having to reactively adjust your SEO strategy or, worse still, find that you’ve lost the all-important ranking positions you’ve worked so had to get.
Summary & Feedback
Tracking your competitors websites is very different to watching what your competitors are up to in almost every other respect.
I recall the days when mystery shopping was the No.1 method for finding out what competitors were doing (and indeed checking that your own staff were doing their jobs properly).
It worked brilliantly in physical retail stores and still does, and in some respects that’s what tracking your competitors websites does in the digital age – but it won’t miss the things the human eye might in a fleeting visit to a physical store.
You should, of course, focus on your own SEO activity and strategy above all else. However, part of that strategy has to be awareness of what your competitors are doing.
If you’ve any thoughts you’d like to share, or feedback to give, please leave a comment.
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