4 Effective Ways To Track The Growth of Your Competitors
If you run an online business, it’s almost impossible to escape the clutches of your competitors.
Every day, they’re doing everything they can to woo customers away from you: lowering their prices, improving their products and services, and spending more money on advertising.
If you want to stay ahead of the game, it’s important that you keep tabs on how your competitors are doing—and that means knowing who they are in the first place.
And in this article, you will learn about the four effective ways to track the growth of your competitors.
Let’s track!
Set up Google Alerts
Google Alerts is the best way to catch any actions happening across the web in real-time. With Google Alerts, you can track the keywords that matter to you and get notified whenever the keywords are mentioned anywhere on the web.
If someone mentions your business or brand name in a blog post or article, Google will immediately alert you via email.
But how will it even help you grow your business?
The opportunities are immense.
Google Alerts can help you keep track of the competition. You can find out which keywords they use and what kind of content they are publishing. This will give you an idea about how to improve your content strategy. On top of that, you can also get notified when their brand name is mentioned anywhere.
Let’s understand this better with a real-time example.
Let’s say one of your competitors is SEMrush. You will get a notification from Google if someone mentions “SEMrush” anywhere on the web.
This will help you track what they are doing and how well their strategies work.
The best?
You will also get notified if they publish any guest posting on other sites. If your competitors get backlinks from high authority websites, you can probably get those backlinks by writing guest posts.
It’s one of the best ways to compete with your competitors and keep them in check. This way, you can create a real-time strategy to beat your competitors in SEO and marketing.
1. Use Firmographic Data
Firmographics are a handy tool for anyone looking to get an edge on the competition. Collecting and sorting firmographic data points such as company name, industry, size, location, and more can quickly get a feel for who you’re against.
At this point, you’ve probably got a good idea of which firms dominate your industry. You also know who your most direct competition is. And once you have a better idea of the lay of the land, it’s time to start cooking up a plan to dominate them.
With these resources at your fingertips, you’ll be able to gain insight into all sorts of details about your competitors and tailor your strategy to ace the game.
2. Spy With Competitor Analysis Tools
When it comes to spying on your competitors, the most important step is getting them into your sights. Once you sense what they’re doing, you can identify what’s working for them and make adjustments for yourself.
You can use competitor analysis tools to see what your competitors are doing in terms of SEO or SEM campaigns. You can also look at their social media profiles to gauge their success in building a following (and whether it’s worth trying to emulate). If there’s anything specific that seems particularly effective—for example, if one company has managed an impressive number of shares on its latest blog post—you can replicate it yourself.
Using a tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs, you can get a clear picture of what your competitors are doing in terms of SEO, PPC, and social media campaigns. You can also get an idea of the number of backlinks they have pointing to each page on their site.
Also, you can use competitor analysis to identify gaps in the market that you might be able to fill. For example, if your competitors aren’t doing anything about social media marketing and many people are talking about how important it is for small businesses these days. There’s an opportunity for you to get ahead by getting started on building up your following.
3. Subscribe to the Other Company’s Marketing Emails
Another effective way to track the growth of your competitors is by subscribing to other companies’ marketing emails. These are usually sent out by email and are easy to find because they always contain an unsubscribe link at the bottom of each email.
To see how often these emails are being sent, you can check the frequency with which they’re being sent out by logging into an email account that isn’t connected with your business or personal one.
For instance, if a competitor emails you every two weeks with their blog post updates or product changes, that shows that they get new content every fortnight, so you can keep up with what’s going on in their industry and when they may be competing for market share across different demographics or regions. You can also measure the number of promotional emails they send to create your email marketing strategy.
4. Monitor Their Social Media Growth
To stay ahead of the game, it’s important to keep an eye on your competition and see what kinds of content they are promoting.
Are they giving other content creators in the industry a fair chance? Or are they only promoting their own content?
You should also note what kind of content they share and see if it aligns with their buyer persona. This will help you position your content to be as relevant as possible.
Also, track which of your competitors are doing well, and refine your strategies.
One of the best social media tools for this is Buzzsumo. It’s an amazing way to identify what content works well in your industry and how other businesses use it to grow their social media following.
You can also use the tool to find out what people are talking about in your niche, which will help you decide on content topics that could benefit from being shared online.
Careful Analysis Will Tell You How Your Competitors Are Succeeding!
Careful analysis of your competitor’s growth will tell you how they succeed and their weaknesses. This is important because it could mean the difference between staying in and going out of business.
It also helps you figure out where your strengths lie to focus on improving them. So how do you do all this? It’s not as daunting as it sounds—in fact, it’s pretty simple once you have all the information laid out before you.
This is just the beginning of your journey. If you’ve been successful in these five steps, then you have a lot more options to consider as well. There are so many ways out there that can help you with your competitor analysis, and we hope these suggestions will give you some ideas on how to start off!