Do you still fear your competition? That’s because you don´t know how to spy on your competitors and take advantage of them. Once you learn how to use these competitor monitoring tools, your mentality will change.
Your competition should inspire and motivate you to do even better. The fact that other players are on the board proves a profitable market for your offer.
That is why launching a complete analysis of your online competition should be an essential point in your marketing strategy, as knowing your competition can mark the success or failure of your business.
We are not talking about copying your competitors but about monitoring their moves, taking note of what has worked for them and what has not, learning from it, and, most importantly, reacting accordingly.
What are Competitor Monitoring tools?
Let’s start by defining what competitor monitoring tools are. These are programs, software or online tools whose function is to help companies track what their online competitors are doing. They can be helpful to spy on price changes, new offers or promotions but also changes in the website layout, new acquisitions or hiring positions and much more.
Competitor monitoring strategies
You can follow different competitor monitoring strategies depending on what area of the business you are interested in. Let’s explore the different options:
1. Competitor price monitoring
Companies use competitor price monitoring and analysis to optimize their business pricing strategy. It is essential not to be left behind concerning the competition and trying to set prices that are as competitive as possible.
This type of tracking is essential for eCommerce sites and SaaS companies. The first ones will need to monitor their main competitors’ product pages to stay on top of any pricing changes, while SaaS companies will need to keep an eye on their competitors’ pricing tables. In an industry where prices are constantly fluctuating, such as selling on Amazon, it will be vital to know when competitors change their pricing, launch an offer or discount prices.
2. Social media monitoring
Monitoring your competitor’s social media networks will be essential to evaluate their actions, interactions, publications, content, and everything else that you think can lead you to attract new potential customers.
Social media monitoring will help you discover what people say about your industry, products, competitors and brand. It is a great way to get feedback on your campaigns and online customer service.
Social media monitoring involves tracking mentions, hashtags, keywords, and social media profiles relevant to your brand to stay informed about your audience and industry.
3. SEO Monitoring
Tracking your competition’s SEO performance will allow you to understand better the keywords they are ranking for and their positions on Google. But by using SEO monitoring tools, you will also find out what content works best for your competitors and what other websites are linking to them. And everything you need to know about how they drive organic traffic to their websites.
All this information will help you create an SEO strategy targeting the right keywords, compelling content, and gaining backlinks from relevant sites in your industry.
Best competitor monitoring tools
1. Visualping
Visualping is a competitor monitoring tool that online businesses use to automate the process of spying on their competition. This tool allows you to track all sorts of online changes and is very easy to use. All you need to do is introduce the URL of the webpage you want to follow and select the area of the page you want to keep an eye on. The system will send you an email notification once a change is made. And you can also personalize your alerts, so you only receive them when a specific keyword is added or removed.
Due to its versatility, digital marketers and business owners use it to track competitors’ pricing changes, social media bios, posts and links across every channel. But also to keep track of web design changes, new content and press releases, customer reviews and anything that will help them stay in the know of what their competitors are doing.
Keeping an eye on competitors’ moves in real time gives you a significant advantage and puts you in a better position to react faster and make the right moves. It removed all the guessing work and tedious competitors monitoring manual tasks.
2. Boardfy
This platform began as an internal tool of the Predomina Company. They developed it to monitor the prices of their competitors and apply better strategies in their eCommerce, but realized that it was a powerful opportunity that they decided to market it. Broadfy allows you to know who sells your products and their price. It also notifies you who raises and lowers prices in their online store.
3. Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is a desktop tool with free and paid versions. It allows you to do an SEO or “CrawlerCrawler” analysis of your website. The program scans all internal URLs of a website and does a quick and powerful SEO audit.
4. SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is a good starting point for knowing who your competitors are and getting a general view of their online presence. This tool allows you to understand your competitor’s sources of web traffic, geographical location data from where the visits are received, main keywords, search terms, and the RRSS from where they receive most visits. This business intelligence tool allows you to compare and quickly analyze the web traffic evolution.
5. Ubersuggest
You can enter your competitor’s domain into this freemium keyword tool, and you will see how they’re doing with their SEO and get ideas to improve your rankings. Ubersuggest will also give you ideas for content ideation to outrank your competition in search engines.
6. SocialBlade
SocialBlade is a tool specialized in social network analysis. It offers data and statistics on most social media platforms, including YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and Instagram. It helps marketers better understand social trends, what their potential customers are discussing on social media networks and what competitors post and share on their channels.
7. Facebook Add Library
Suppose your marketing strategy includes social media ads. In that case, you may consider using Facebook Ad Library to see what ads are running for your competitors on this platform and get ideas to design better ads for your brand.
8. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the best-known SEO tools for keyword research, tracking your site rankings, monitoring your competitor’s SEO efforts, and reacting accordingly. This tool will provide information such as which keywords you should optimize your content to outrank your competition, how many backlinks you will need to build to each piece of content and search volume trends in your market niche.
9. Mention
With Mention, you can monitor every time your brand name is mentioned but also your main competitor’s mentions. The tool sends you an email whenever keywords you track are mentioned on any website or social media channel. Uncovering third-party referral opportunities are excellent, and understanding users’ sentiments towards your competitor’s brands are excellent.
10. SpyFu
Last but not least, SpyFu gives you data on the keywords your competitors are ranking for and the ads they are running. But it also does some analysis work for you and tells you the best opportunities for the position.
Conclusion
Now that you have a marketing arsenal to spy on your competitors, you have the competitive advantage you need. Choose the competitor monitoring tools that best fit your marketing strategy and use the data to stay ahead of the game.
