Last updated on October 27th, 2010
If you’re in a very competitive niche or industry, you likely have someone you’re always vying for the top spot in the search engines with. A big part of remaining competitive online is effectively tracking your competition…watch what they do to maintain their position and perhaps match it so you don’t lose ground to them.
Staying on top of your online competition allows you to effectively deal with any changes that occur in either their website or the search engines.
Fortunately, there are a lot of tools out there to help webmasters and SEOs track their competition. These tools allow you to see who’s linking to them, what their social media presence is and even see what others are saying about them.
Continue reading for 5 easy tools you can use to track your competition and help ensure you don’t get left behind by any changes that improve their position in the search engines. Each of these tools covers different aspects of marketing a small business online.
Free tool that allows you to enter a specific keyword and monitor activity for that phrase daily, weekly or even as it happens. You can enter a particular company’s name in quotations (i.e. “SEO Advantage”) and you will be notified by email when something changes with the competitor’s site. You can even enter keywords common to both your companies to see whose content is having a better reach.
Google Alerts will deliver a message via email that contains new blog posts, articles, news stories and more for the particular keyword you enter.
Another free tool that alerts you to any changes in your competitor’s website…kind of like a Google Alerts exclusively for site content. What Change Detection does is create a log file for the particular site in question and lets you know when changes in the page text are recorded.
3. HowSociable
Allows you to enter your competitor’s name and see how their brand performs across 32 different metrics, providing you with a “total visibility score.” Such metrics include a “Twitter Tweets Score” and a “LinkedIn People Score” among others.
Allows you to see what others are saying about your competitor across different social networks. SocialMention breaks down the comments by date, gives you an average sentiment and provides the top keywords associated with the particular brand you’re looking at. You can even separate this into different sources of comment (i.e. blog comments, images, news, etc.).
5. Majestic SEO
See who’s linking to your competition and even compare it against your own site. You can register and test the service for free and if it works for you, pay a low monthly fee. Seeing your competitor’s backlinks can help you identify untapped resources and provide insight into your competitor’s link building strategy.
These aren’t the only analytic tools out there but these 5 cover the important areas of marketing a small business online.
Evaluating your competition is vital to achieving and maintaining high search engine rankings. Each of these tools can send updates directly to you through email or you can subscribe to an RSS feed. Either one of these puts the information right at your fingertips so you can react quickly to any changes.