7 Proven Strategies for Effortless Competitor Monitoring

The most essential part of SEO isn’t getting Google to like your website. It’s getting Google to like your site more than that of your competition.

And to do that, you must fully understand at all times what your competitors are doing and how they’re doing it across all verticals. Plus, your digital rivals are also a great source of ready-to-go solutions to tap into for proven ideas.

Competitor monitoring can be a complex and challenging task, but don’t worry.

SE Ranking offers a full suite of competitive analysis tools to cover all your monitoring needs, including:

In this article, we’re going to share strategies for getting actionable insights into your online competition using the tools mentioned above.

Before tracking your competitors’ online activity, you need to know who they are. SE Ranking offers several methods to identify your niche, direct, and prominent SERP competitors. To learn how to do this step by step, see our dedicated guide on how to find competitors of any website.

1. Monitor competitors’ organic and paid campaigns

After finding out who your competitors are, the next step is to examine their online strategies. This is where SE Ranking’s Competitive Research Tool comes in handy, since it provides an in-depth analysis of your competitors’ SEO and PPC tactics.

Thanks to its powerful competitive intelligence capabilities, this tool gives comprehensive insights into your rivals’ best-performing keywords, helping you identify which pages and advertising campaigns drive the most web traffic. You can also use it to assess your rivals’ domain authority, evaluate their backlink profile, and more.

Its dashboards in the Overview section display traffic trends, keyword dynamics, and the analyzed domain/URL’s backlink acquisition history. Plus, this tool provides insights on traffic distribution by country, keyword distribution by ranking position, and query search intent, which helps you understand the types of keywords your competitors are targeting.

Similar data is available for paid search.

As the name suggests, the Organic Traffic Research section provides a detailed overview of organic search traffic to the analyzed domain or URL. It features a detailed table of keywords driving visitors to your competitor’s site, along with key SEO metrics for each term (e.g., search volume, keyword difficulty, ranking position, search intent, estimated traffic volume, and so on).

And unlike most other competitor monitoring tools, SE Ranking helps you identify and track keywords triggering AI Overviews (AIOs). To find and monitor competitor keywords with AIOs, use the appropriate filter above the table.

Under the Ads History subtab, you can analyze your competitors’ current and past Google ads, and use this info to drive only the best ads for your business.

Essentially, you get a list of the most popular keyword ads along with their coverage, estimated traffic volume, the share of traffic they capture, search volume, level of ad competition, and cost-per-click.

As always, you need to analyze the data to understand which ads have the highest profit potential for you. Ideally, you want to find keyword ads with a high traffic share, low competition level and affordable cost-per-click, but it’s never so cut and dry. There is also no guarantee that running these ads will work for you, which is why you have to put your own spin on each one.

The best part is that you can see a preview of each ad with its title, URL, and description. You are free to analyze the ads and use any available info to create ads capable of putting up a fight for searchers’ attention.

2. Monitor your competitors’ keyword rankings alongside your own

When you are adding a website to SE Ranking, you can either hand-pick your direct competitors from a list of suggestions or manually add them if you already know who they are.

Note: You can also access project settings and add competitors after setting up your SE Ranking project.

The tool lets you add up to 20 rivals (based on your subscription plan) and track competitor keyword rankings for the same keywords you’re tracking. Competitor rankings are evaluated in the same search engines and regions you’ve selected for your project.

To see analysis results, go to the Added Competitors subtab of the My Competitors section. The Overall view tab groups ranking data by search engine, displays the site’s ranking positions for each keyword and compares it to added competitors.

The Detailed view tab provides detailed information on each competitor’s ranking positions.

This is a great way to discover how your keyword rankings compare to those of your competitors. The tool also helps you track sudden ranking changes. For example, if one of your top keywords drops in rankings, it’s recommended to check if the same thing happened to your competitors’ rankings for that keyword. 

SE Ranking’s Insights feature contains similar data. It provides information on keywords and pages whose impressions or clicks have significantly increased/decreased.

This tool takes the hassle out of filtering and sorting data by automatically collecting, analyzing, and presenting it in a clear and easy-to-understand format. Just connect your SE Ranking project to Google Search Console. 

This is a truly exceptional tool for assessing your direct competitors’ SERP activities. The data it provides gives you a pretty clear competitive advantage.

3. Check competitors’ search visibility

The Visibility Rating tab in the My Competitors block lets you check your and your SEO competitors’ website visibility in every major search engine. It also gives all search competitors a visibility rating. This goes beyond your top 20 rivals. The visibility rating of each rival is sorted by their overall visibility score for your list of target keywords.

Performing regular visibility checks can help you compare the keyword visibility of your site to that of your rivals for selected keywords. You’ll also get a list of top players in your industry to closely study your site’s ranking analytics and evaluate actual SEO results. 

Keeping a constant eye on your website’s visibility not only enables you to predict your site’s traffic jumps and falls, but it also helps you filter out your indirect competitors to make finding direct ones easier.

By comparing your website’s data with that of your main competitors, you can set clear priorities for the keywords you want to rank higher for in search. To make more informed decisions about competitor sites, use metrics like traffic forecast, percent of keywords in the top 10, Domain Trust score, and total referring domain count.

4. Identify competitors targeting your chosen keywords

Another way to monitor competitor activity is to explore your SERP competitors. The SERP Competitors tool gives you actionable insights into the top 100 search results for every search query added to your project. It also contains information on their ranking dynamics.

Think of this tool as a way to keep up with the competition and the keywords they use. Just select your campaign’s target keywords and see how their search results change over time.

This enables you to monitor your top 20 competitors and any website with the potential to become your direct rival. 

Clicking on a search result shows you how its ranking positions increased or decreased over time.

With this data, you can grasp how a competitor website is growing and developing and whether or not it’s close to becoming your direct competitor. To make keeping an eye on potential competitors easier, tag them to see how their rankings change. You can also go back in time to learn about their origins and growth history with specific keywords.

Furthermore, the SERP Competitors tool gives you the opportunity to keep track of global niche changes for your target keywords and see how the SERP environment evolves over time. You can also analyze the top 10 or top 100 search results to find new players, whether they are brand new websites or ****** ones whose list of target keywords only recently begun expanding.

Last but not least, this tool also gives you the power to monitor competitors’ brand SERPs. Adding your competitors’ names to your target keywords helps you see if you are ranking first for the keywords that matter most. It is also a great way to find out if any of your competitors launched a negative PR campaign in an effort to push you down in search.

5. Measure the share of voice between you and your competitors

Share of voice (SoV) helps you evaluate the strength of your brand voice compared to your competitors’. SE Ranking calculates SoV by estimating organic traffic from your target keywords. This measure focuses on the top 20 search positions for these keywords, considering only the search engines specified in your project.

To find this data, go to the My Competitors section of your project and select Share of Voice from the dropdown menu. You’ll get a quick view of your site’s SoV from the summary widget.

For a more in-depth breakdown, check the detailed table comparing your site’s search performance to that of your competitors. It will highlight your domain for easy identification.

The table displays the top 20 domains ranked by estimated traffic from your target keywords.

Pay special attention to the following parameters:

• URLs in Top 20: This section reveals which pages from each domain rank in the top 20 for your keywords. It also provides data on each URL’s number of keywords appearing in the top 20, SoV, and estimated traffic.

• Keywords in Top 20: This shows the specific keywords ranked for in the top 20 by a domain. It also displays information on the search engine, ranking position, share of voice, and traffic forecast.

Constantly monitoring your competitors’ SoV helps you detect meaningful shifts in their SEO strategies. For example, if there is a sudden increase in one of your competitor’s SoVs, they may have launched a new SEO initiative or made substantial website updates. This gives you the chance to respond quickly by adjusting your own digital marketing strategy.

6. Perform a competitive backlink analysis

Backlinks are vital for SEO because search engines like Google tend to give more credit to sites with a decent number of quality backlinks. Google considers websites with a higher number of quality backlinks as more credible than other SERP results for the same query. 

With the Backlink Checker tool, you can find all the backlinks of any domain, be it yours or a competitor’s. This gives you key insights into the channels your competitors use to build their search engine authority. 

On top of that, the tool can also help you create a list of websites for your future partnerships and analyze competitor anchor text strategies.

As for link building donors, check for the types of links your competitors use, their dynamics, dofollow/nofollow link ratio, pages with more or less links, and so on.

At the end of the day, backlink analyses give you the data you need to develop effective link acquisition strategies.

Getting a list containing each competitor’s backlink

The Backlink Checker tool provides tabs with overviews of the website’s backlink profile, data on referring domains, anchor texts, pages, IPs, and, most importantly, details on the backlinks themselves.

The Overview page offers a snapshot of your website’s backlink profile. Key metrics like Domain Trust and Page Trust reveal how authoritative the analyzed site and its main page are. You’ll also find details on the number of unique websites linking to your competitors, and their total number of backlinks and anchor texts.

The report flags any broken or toxic backlinks. It also provides visual charts showing changes in competitor backlinks over time, including gains and losses, and highlights the most common keywords used in those links.

Under the Referring Domains tab is a list of all websites linked to individual competitors. This comes with data on domain trust, total traffic estimation, number of backlinks, and **** of detection.

The Backlinks section provides information on active, new, and lost competitor backlinks along with core SEO data like domain trust, page trust, toxicity score, traffic estimation, anchor text, backlink type (dofollow/nofollow), and more.

As a rule of thumb, it’s useful to pay attention to the Domain Trust and Page Trust scores here. These metrics were specifically designed to predict how well a domain/page will rank in search. Better scores indicate a higher likelihood of the domain/page ranking high. This helps you determine the best websites to reach out to.

The Anchor Texts block displays data on anchor text used in detected backlinks. You can filter this list by word count and see how many backlinks/referring domains have the specified anchor text. It also shows you how many dofollow/nofollow backlinks contain the analyzed anchor text.

You can also place a mark on competitor backlinks indicating that those are the ones you want to monitor most, and then add them to the Backlink Monitor tool.

Tracking competitor backlink statuses

After adding the backlinks of your competitors that you want to monitor to the Backlink Monitor tool, you can get additional information on each and monitor its status around the clock. 

Although it was created to help you monitor your own backlink profile, you can still get useful information on each competitor’s backlink, including the actual status (is the backlink found on the page or not), Google indexation status, the link’s anchor text, target URL, backlink type, and when the backlink was first seen.

7. Get notified whenever a competitor’s page gets updated

SE Ranking’s Page Changes Monitor tool provides an additional way to keep an eye on your competitors. It detects any changes made to a page you chose to monitor and notifies you once they occur.

For example, you can add a competitor pricing page to the tool and get notified when it detects an update to their product and service pricing, helping you react if necessary. Alternatively, you can monitor their blog’s homepage and be the first to know when they publish new content.

Tracking your competitors’ top-performing pages is a must. Focus on pages that rank in the top 3 and top 10 search results for your target keywords. This allows you to detect changes made to page content, headings, titles and description, and updates to their internal linking structure.

When monitoring pages, you can configure the tool to monitor only the most important page elements for you, including the page title, description, keywords, headers, content, links, robots.txt file, HTTP code, search engine index status, and more. 

In fact, you can add every single competitor page to the tool and get notified via email whenever a change occurs. This prevents you from having to constantly visit your competitors’ sites to know what they’re up to. Just add the most important pages for you to monitor and the tool will inform you of any updates.

BONUS: Analyze your competitor’s technical SEO setup

Learn even more about your competition and uncover their sites’ technical SEO elements by running an audit. This can help you further understand why their rankings may suddenly change relative to yours.

The Website Audit tool shows you how friendly your competitors’ websites are to search engine crawlers like Googlebot. It also finds technical errors, if there are any. During the analysis, the site is evaluated for every major technical SEO check. It leaves you with a report containing insights about your competitor’s technical health.

And keep in mind that regular audits help you understand how your competitors change their site each week. This can help you keep up with or outpace them on all fronts.

Final words on performing competitor analyses with SE Ranking

Businesses new or old need to practice competitive monitoring to succeed.

By keeping tabs on competitor activities across all verticals, you’re ensuring that your business strategy is as strong or stronger than the competition. Your main objective should be to monitor every major competitor, which is a tremendously time-consuming task without dedicated competitor analysis tools.

Thankfully, SE Ranking gives you everything you need to get the drop on your competitors, whether its tracking competitor keyword rankings to monitoring backlinks. And if you still haven’t used SE Ranking yet you can try it for free for 14 days.