Monitoring your competitor prepares you to make your own strategy for your business. Being online helps you track your competitor easily. It also gives your competitor opportunity to track your online strategy. However, it is best to draft your strategy after reviewing your adversary.
are few tools you can use to monitor your competition and their strategy.
Monitor competitor keyword strategy
A tool like SpyFu can reveal the keywords your competitors are targeting for paid and organic search. Once revealed, you can use this information to identify any keywords they’re currently missing and jump on the opportunity to target these phrases.
Google alerts
Google alerts is among the tool currently available. It let you set the alerts by the keywords and phrases that send an e-mail notification and link every time that word or phrase pops up on a site, blog, or news story — depending on how the alert is configured. A business primarily concerned about three top competitors. For example, might set up a Google alert on all three companies and their top executives monitoring every time they get a mention online.
Opt for competitor newsletters
The best way to keep a close eye on specials, promotions, pertinent news and deals competitors are offering is through opting for their newsletters. Pay attention to their marketing techniques, pricing strategy, customer relation and customer interaction. It will also help you understand what your competitor is doing to stand out from the crowd.
Examine their ranking against keywords
Once you can close watch on your competitor keywords and their target audience. Use SEO ranking tools to see their ranking against those keywords and compare it with your own strategy. You can use the tool like AccuRanker for SEO ranking to track the progress. You can also use the tool to see how your competitors are performing against your target keywords, if different than those above. If their keyword strategy outranks yours, check their website for any supporting content helping them to rank. If so, is it something (e.g. a guide) you could do better?
Monitor competitor Social Activity
By keeping an eye on the social channels and posts of your competition, you’ll gain insight into what they’re sharing, how they’re talking to customers, and the topics performing well—and not so well—for them.
There are various ways to do this, the easiest and cheapest of which is to set up Facebook and Twitter lists. Like or follow your competitors’ pages on relevant social channels (You may want to do this from a personal profile, as opposed to your business one) before organizing them into lists. This way, you can easily monitor their content by clicking through to the list regularly. Even without having to visit their profile page or relying on it appearing in your newsfeed organically.
To track everything a competitor is posting, use a social listening tool like Hootsuite, which allows you to set up streams focusing on specific profile pages, as well as hashtags.