Your website is only as good as the traffic it can maintain. After all, your site can be loaded with valuable content but be relatively worthless if nobody ever sees it. Because of this, there is always stiff competition in most search results between those who want to grab the top rankings in search. How exactly can you ascend to the top, and furthermore, how can this be maintained once achieved? It isn’t easy, but one key element in both of these areas is knowing what your competition is doing and how well they are currently performing. In the following article, we will discuss three simple methods that you can use to keep track of your competition and stay ahead of them in the game for SERP dominance.

Social Media Metrics

One of the fastest growing areas in which brands and businesses are boosting rankings and growing business is through the use of social media. There are many tools out there that can help webmasters keep track of their own metrics, but these can also be used in some cases to track your competitors. Within sites such as Facebook itself, there is now a function that allows you to add pages to a watchlist and monitor their clout and number of likes. These methods can be a free way to keep tabs on which competitors are pinging links to their readers on a regular basis and how much effect those messages are having on said audiences.

Paid Search Research

Most competitors that are serious about dominating SERPs will engage in some forms of digital advertising. Because of this, you can often track down their trails with search tools such as SEMRush. You can input a competitor’s URL and see how much they have spent, the amount of traffic they have acquired through these results and the number of overall ad campaigns ran by them. With this information collected about all of your competitors, you can then begin to compare each of them to one another and see why some of your competitors may be doing better than others.

Competitors’ Offers and Discounts

SEMRush can again be a great solution for determining what your competitors are currently promoting, and which of these products or services is performing the best. You will be able to fetch any and all media ads that are being run by each competitor and subsequently can assess whether your offered deals are on par with theirs. In just a few short minutes, you can take inventory of your competition and how well they stack up against your prices and offerings. By knowing this information upfront, you can then begin to alter your efforts accordingly in order to ensure that you have the best deals in your niche.

Conclusion

By pinging links to a search engine via paid advertising or SEO, you can attract a variety of new visitors and customers. Don’t expect, however, not to run into competition in any and all mediums. By knowing your competitors’ best deals, understanding how much advertising they currently purchase and having the knowledge of their social media influence, you can counteract any of these competitive factors with a bit of preparation and dedication.