Monitoring your competitors is part of growing your business. You want to know more about them and what they do to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Knowing their strengths will inspire you to adopt their best practices or do something to outshine them. Understanding their weaknesses is also helpful as it will let you determine things that you should avoid doing. Plus, you can think of how you can make those areas better on your end and be on top of the competition. It includes digital marketing. For example, digital marketing San Diego agencies check out the competitors and use their information to create their campaigns.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is part of the digital marketing strategies of these companies. A San Diego SEO specialist will see how the competitors do their SEO and learn from them. For instance, they determine what keywords high-ranking sites use and what pages link to the competitors that do not link to them. Now that you know the importance of monitoring your competitors, the next step is to find ways to do this without letting them know about it.
Know your competitors
Before you can do something to monitor them, you have to know first who your competitors are. A quick way to do it is by performing a search on the web using the products or services you offer as your keywords. Those that show up on the first page of the results are your top contenders. There are also SEO tools that you can use for this. Typing your website on these tools will show you the competing sites and their rankings.
Follow their social media accounts and blogs
Get up to date on what they are up to by following their social media accounts and blogs. Their social media accounts will give you a better idea of how they interact with their audience. You can learn a thing or two about how to keep your followers engaged. Following their blogs will give you potential topics to write about and ensure that they are better than the competitors’.
See what users say about them
Determining what users say about them will give you an insight into what things satisfy them and what frustrates them. It’s one way of assessing their strengths and weaknesses, which, as mentioned, you can use to your advantage. Their site and social media accounts may contain comments or feedbacks about them. Third-party review sites and forums are other sites to check out. Setting up alerts to get notifications when there is a mention of the competitor’s name is one way to ensure you get the latest about them. You can customize these alerts to notify you when specific words are mentioned.
Find the keywords they use
Knowing which keywords these popular sites use will help with your SEO as you can incorporate those keywords too in your content. Additionally, there are SEO tools that show you your competitots often have the feature to tell which keywords they are ranking high too.
Determine the pages that link to them
As mentioned above, you may use SEO tools to see which sites link to the competitors but do not link to you. You can target these sites and find ways for them to link to your page too. If they linked to your competitors, you might also have relevant content that they can link to.
See which influencers they work with
Many companies work with influencers because of their massive and strong following. Their words have power, as many users believe in them. Do your research to see which influencers promoted or recommended your competitors, and see if you too can work with them. You may also find influencers on the same guild as them, so you may ask them to recommend your company or site.
Everything considered
Monitoring your competitors is something you should not take lightly. It’s an important process in ensuring that you stay on top of the competition, and find ways to do better than them.
