There are several key methods to ethically spy on your competitors’ SEO and digital marketing strategy. Almost every modern business faces some level of competition. Naturally, some level of tracking, monitoring, and ethical spying is critical to any successful marketing strategy.
These crucial tasks eliminate the trial and error from your SEO efforts by providing you current insights of what is actually working. By taking the time to strategically monitor and outline potential strengths of your competitions’ performance, you can improve critical elements of your digital marketing efforts. Read on to learn about how to ethically spy on your competitor’s SEO and digital marketing strategy.
The importance of tracking competitors’ marketing activities
In the modern digital era, ethically spying and tracking your competitors’ marketing activities is essential for the success of your business. As a small business owner, you likely know the importance of business intelligence. Monitoring the SEO performance of your competitors is essential to identify opportunities and make data-driven decisions. If a competitor is successful in a strategy you are currently practicing, identify how you can do it better. Look for strategic ways to improve your targeting, content curation, or keyword generation.
In many cases, watching another business’s digital marketing strategy can reveal powerful insights about your target market and uncover important industry trends. This is essential to strategically create an excellent audience targeting strategy. As you plan to ethically spy on your competitors consider the importance of tracking to understand industry problems and gain broader insight.
Track organic keywords
What are organic keywords?
To effectively track and monitor your competitors’ SEO performance, you need to strategically track organic keywords. When properly managed, organic search is an incredibly valuable marketing channel for your organization. Organic keywords are commonly used to attract free traffic for your search engine optimization strategy. Unlike PPC, or pay-per-click keywords, that are obtained through paid marketing campaigns, organic keywords capitalize on the billions of unpaid Google search positions that occur every day.
Using a free SEO tool to track organic keywords
To understand how your competitors are outranking you, you need to understand the keywords they are currently ranking for. It is not enough to guess what keywords to include in your site’s content. Therefore, it is commonly recommended to use advanced tools that generate real keywords for your organic traffic strategy. Popular platforms like Ubersuggest, for example, can instantly analyze what keywords your competitors’ domains are ranking for in organic searches. Ubersuggest can even calculate the search volume, current position, and estimated monthly visits for specific web pages. Through analyzing this data, you can effectively gauge the estimated competition through a comprehensive SEO difficulty score. Consider integrating popular SEO tools like Ubersuggest to track organic keywords for your organization.
Analyze backlinks
What are backlinks?
To ethically spy on your competitors’ SEO and digital marketing efforts, it is essential to evaluate backlinks. Backlinks are an essential component of your search engine optimization strategy. These are created when another website links to any of your webpages. Backlinks are comparable to a citation on a formal document. To optimize your in-house SEO efforts and spy on your competitors’ performance, you will need to familiarize yourself with backlinks.
Analyzing backlinks with a free SEO tool
In order to analyze your competitors’ performance, you need to evaluate backlinks with an SEO tool. With popular free tools like Ubersuggest, you can easily input a domain and receive instant results. After evaluating your competitors’ web pages, Ubersuggest will calculate the site’s overall domain score. Compromised of several factors, the domain score directly determines the overall strength of a site. The powerful search engine optimization tool can than calculate the total backlinks that are being returned to this domain. It can even calculate the unique, referring domains that are link back to your competitors’ sites. This is essential to monitor your backlinks over time, as well as new and lost backlinks.
Conduct a site audit
Conducting a site audit is an essential ethical strategy to evaluate your competitors’ SEO performance. A simple, SEO site audit is one of the simplest ways to see how competing sites rank, and how you can potentially improve your current site. One of the best ways to conduct a site audit is by using a free tool like Ubersuggest.
You can conduct a rapid site audit that provides an instant on-page SEO score for your competitors’ sites. To determine this score, Ubersuggest will thoroughly analyze competing sites’ speed, SEO issues, and critical errors. This way, you can identify key ways to speed up your website. If you conduct a site audit on your own domain, you can even access comprehensive warnings and recommendations to improve the overall health of your webpages. Consider using a powerful SEO and keyword research tool like Ubersuggest to monitor your competitors’ online performance.
Identify top traffic pages
To ethically spy on the SEO marketing performance of your competitors’, it is essential to identify their top traffic pages. Several factors contribute to estimating site traffic. Largely, top pages are identified by estimated monthly visits, total backlinks, as well as references on popular social media channels. One of the easiest ways to analyze your competitor’s top pages is by conducting a free report on Ubersuggest. Popular SEO tools provide an instant report to identify your competitions’ high-ranking page titles and URLs. Depending on the scope of your marketing efforts, you can even evaluate the top SEO pages by country within your Ubersuggest report.
There are several key strategies to ethically spy on your competition’ SEO performance. Taking the time to evaluate backlinks, track referral keywords, and analyze domains, you can identify key solutions to optimize your digital marketing efforts. Since the process to conduct these tasks by hand is incredibly complex, it is essential to utilize a free keyword research tool. Ubersuggest is a powerful, free SEO tool that specializes in the generation of new keyword and content ideas. Providing rapid access to key data like keyword suggestions, domain overviews, and top SEO pages, it is an essential tool for businesses of all size. Should you want to access additional features and functionality, there are affordable paid packages of this powerful tool offered as well.
