“Competition brings out the best in the product”
Unless you hold a monopoly or are a drug lord, you must be facing competition in business. In fact, no business is untouched from competition today but hey, not all the competition is bad. On the contrary, competition shows there is good scope of making money in there 😉
But, if you want to stay ahead of competition, you must know what your competitors are upto. You must keep an eye on what they are doing and what are the strategies they are leaving out.
So, here I am with five secret ways you can keep track on your competitors online.
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Check their mentions
You must know whenever someone mentions your competitor online. Luckily, we have Google alerts for that. Just add your competitor’s name in Google alerts tool and you will start receiving emails containing the links of pages where your competitors are mentioned. I personally have used this to replicate backlinks of my competitors.
If you want to check mentions on social media sites like Facebook, try unamo social or any other social media mention tool.
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Track their SEO campaigns
Okay, let’s admit! SEO is very important if you want to improve your rankings. Good thing is you can easily track SEO of your competitors.
Use Ahrefs to check backlinks and the keywords for which your rivals are ranking. This way you can replicate the backlinks and also target the similar keywords in your SEO efforts. Also, you can check their onpage strategy and analyze where you are lagging behind.
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Ad campaigns
SEO is good but it can be slow, right? Hence, you might plan to start a Google ad campaign to gain instant traffic. With the help of help of SEMrush, you can analyze the traffic your competitors are getting via ads. You can also see the exact ad copies and landing pages they are using!
This can be of great help while planning ad campaigns as it can save a lot of money. A penny saved is a penny earned, right?
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Keep checking their websites
You must keep track on your competitor’s websites and see if they have made any recent changes. Companies usually change the content or design in order to improve conversions or to update their marketing goals and sometimes, it works wonders. You might want to replicate that to your website too
But, keeping an eye on multiple competitors with multiple web pages can be a lot of work! Stillio can be a lifesaver in such scenarios. It can take a screenshot of the website on regular intervals so that you can check it out anytime.
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Go manual
All these tools are great but you must do some of the work manually too.
Every product has some drawbacks. As a competitor, you must know the problem your competitor’s clients are facing. Thus you can ensure you don’t repeat the mistakes your rivals are committing. A great way to do this is by checking their customer reviews. A bad review of your competitor can be a great teacher for your business!
Also, make sure you understand the exact process your rivals are following. The only way to do this is to act as customer and approach them. This helps a lot in getting a fair idea of process.
There is nothing wrong in checking what your competitors are upto. In today’s cut throat competition, survival of the fittest seems very appropriate to me!
I hope this article helped you spying your competitors, feel free to leave your comments below for any queries.