The purpose of search engine optimization (SEO) efforts is not just to make Google think your website is reputable and well-optimized. Your main goal should be to be better than all your competitors since it’s the main way to be ranked higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) and drive more traffic. To stay competitive, you need to know who your competitors are, what strategies they have and how you can outperform them. Your digital rivals should be your source of inspiration in terms of SEO strategy, so it’s vital to know how to assess their efforts.
For example, if you are not ranking high for your keywords, it means that someone else is. That’s when an SEO competitor rank tracker comes in handy – it allows you to keep an eye on a huge number of competitors and adjust your strategy at any given time based on this data. In this article, you’ll learn how to track your competitors’ keyword positions and how to outrank your digital rivals, so keep on reading.
How To Track Your Competitors’ Keyword Positions
If you have been in the market for a while, you already know who your competitors are. You have probably already tried to identify what they are doing to rank higher in the SERPs, but these guesses are not always accurate. Fortunately, you don’t have to guess anymore because there are some key steps you can take to track your competitor’s keyword positions.
Use a keyword position-tracking tool.
The variety of SEO-related tools is overwhelming, so a careful and reasonable selection is crucial to achieving efficacy in tracking competitors’ keyword positions. A powerful tool with advanced capabilities is a goldmine allowing you to automate dozens of essential SEO assessments and save plenty of time and resources. Thus, an exemplary SEO rank tracker should aid you in witnessing high-traffic keywords and pages, monitoring ranking changes and promptly identifying ranking drops.
Moreover, a good rank-tracking tool also should have features to help you compare your SEO outcomes for specific keywords to your competitors’ performance, define high-potential pages and keywords and resemble your website rankings across different locations so that you investigate the pits and pearls of your SEO strategy in various markets.
Check your SERP competitors.
SERP competition is a genuinely dynamic environment requiring ongoing monitoring and analysis. Search engines constantly launch major and minor updates to their search algorithms, directly affecting website ranking positions in SERPs.
So, to stay abreast of the market competition and manage the up-to-date list of niche competitors, you need to get a transparent distribution of top positions in search results for particular search engines and periods. This data will help you understand the accurate status of your competitors’ rankings and evaluate the effectiveness of your own SEO efforts.
Identify your target keywords to track both your website and your competitors side-by-side.
To get the most out of tracking your competitors’ keyword positions, you need to understand your target keywords and properly examine their performance in search. To streamline the legwork, dive into the report of a reputable position-tracking tool showing the jumped, dropped and unchanged keyword rankings at the top of the search results.
Such information lets you track progress, quickly incorporate adjustments into your SEO strategy and identify new opportunities to outrank your niche competition.
Track your main competitors’ keyword positions over time.
The key here is to track competitors’ keyword positions over time. By seeing how your competitors have been performing during a specific period of time and how their positions change, you can identify trends, analyze rivals’ strategies and use these insights to your advantage. You can better understand what keywords they prioritize, what their strengths and weaknesses are and whether there are any emerging keyword trends in your industry.
Moreover, it can help you compare your progress to your competitors and understand what you should change to outperform them. Finally, tracking competitors’ keyword positions is an effective way to respond to changes, become more adaptable and make adjustments to your strategy quickly.
Analyze your competitors’ top URLs by keywords to optimize your content strategies.
Your competitors’ successful online performance should be the source of your inspiration and motivation as it showcases the high demand and potential of certain topics or search queries you can smoothly outperform. Therefore, pay attention to competitors’ top URLs to gather what makes these pages rank that high and use this information for your purpose — to refine and optimize the content on your site.
Define the topics and keywords covered on these top pages, and evaluate the content quality and the type of fulfilled search intent. It will help you to create a blueprint for improving the related content on your website and get new content and topic ideas to capture your target audience and surpass competitors.
Benefits of Tracking Your Competitors’ Keyword Positions
Keyword traffic offers a lot of benefits for those who do it right and invest time in competitor research. It helps you stay ahead of the competition, increase organic website traffic and improve the relevancy of your website traffic. Let’s talk about them in detail.
Stay ahead of the competition.
Tracking your competitors’ keywords is one of the main ways to stay ahead of your rivals and adjust your SEO strategy accordingly based on what your competitors are doing. You can easily identify your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses and how they approach their SEO strategies. It’s impossible to stay competitive in the cutting-throat market without monitoring your competitors, and keyword tracking tools can assist you with that.
Increase website traffic.
When you track your competitors’ strategies, you can identify high-potential keywords that drive the most traffic and use them in your content. As a result, it will drive traffic to your website as well. Moreover, you can identify content gaps and create content that your competitors don’t cover and focus on that. Increasing organic traffic can help you generate new leads and conversions and improve your brand visibility online.
Improve the relevancy of your website traffic.
To grow your business revenue and brand reputation, you need to drive relevant traffic to your website — a target audience interested in your products or services. Tracking competitors’ keywords and rankings can contribute to getting inside the mind of your target market so that producing niche-specific, user-oriented content that addresses customers’ pain points, offers a solution to their concerns and ends their search for particular goods.
Moreover, improving website traffic relevancy by revealing your competitors’ strategies and optimization efforts can also help to reduce bounce rates, increase conversions and grow your online visibility.
How To Outrank Your Competitors
Your goal should not only be able to stay at the same level as your competitors but also outrank them. By implementing an effective SEO strategy, you can easily achieve this. Here are some tips you can follow:
Your content should be of high quality, relevant and valuable to your clients. It should meet their needs and interests, provide solutions to their issues and answer their search intent. Moreover, it should be engaging to encourage users to share it on social media. Using various visuals like high-quality images, videos, GIFs and other media can help you to boost user engagement.
Optimize on-page SEO elements.
Once you create your content, make sure that it is optimized properly. It means including meta titles, meta descriptions and alt tags for the images. Place your target keywords in H1 and H2 and distribute them wisely within the page content, not overloading it with keywords to avoid keyword stuffing and related Google penalties.
Proper UX is a must to ensure a fast-loading, responsive website with seamless navigation and an intuitive interface. Therefore, ensure your website pages are well-structured, fast, clean and accessible from all web browsers and devices.
This will increase the likelihood of people staying longer on the web page and returning to it in the future. Remember that Google pays particular attention to UX/UI, so strive for smooth, sleek pages with user-friendly navigation and responsive design to boost your search rankings.
Build high-quality backlinks.
Finally, consider working on the link-building strategy. It means acquiring relevant backlinks from trustworthy websites related to your niche. This way, you can expand your brand recognition and boost your domain authority, as every backlink from an authoritative website signals your website’s quality and relevance to Google. To build a robust backlink profile, improve your content strategy and produce epic content that others would gladly share and rely on.
Conclusion
To conclude, tracking the keyword positions of your competitors is an essential part of an effective SEO strategy. By doing that, you can stay ahead of the competition, discover new keyword opportunities, increase organic traffic and identify trends for your future content. Fortunately, there are a lot of SEO tools available online that can assist with that, which can help you automate the process and gather insights about your competitors faster.