What is competitor monitoring and how can it help SMBs with SEO and SEM?

Regardless of whether you are doing SEO or SEM on search engines like Google, the way you react to your competition will have a major influence on your business’s chances of being successful online. Don’t just think of your competition as something you need to stay ahead of, they can also teach you a lot — Competitor Monitoring is a vital source of learning and feedback for your digital marketing activities. It will help you to stay ahead of the latest trends in your industry as well as pointing you in the right direction of best practices in digital marketing for SEO and SEM.

These top-ranking results for the term ‘How to be successful online’ offer some great tips for optimizing the meta title and meta descriptions on your site’s pages. See how the keywords ‘successful online’ are found in both the title and description; also the appealing use of odd numbers in titles, as well as appealing authoritative adjectives such as ‘must-read’ or curiosity arousing words like ‘secret facts’, to present these articles as fresh and entice the users to click on them.

You find these kinds of words used in all kinds of content relating to guides. The use of numbers also helps these results to stand out on the SERP and drive clicks. These persuasive techniques might not be the best choice for the keywords you are targeting, so make sure you do a competitor search on the SERP for keywords you are chasing, you will be sure to find other appealing adjectives and formatting techniques that perform a similar role.

Also, notice how the vast majority of the titles on the front page are short enough to fit the full sentence in the title without being cut off, and that the cut off in the description only occurs at points that still give the searcher a full understanding of the purpose of the page and give a sense that there are more interesting parts to come.  For more help with getting this right on your site, check out this article on meta-tags.

As we can see here in the search engine equivalent of a picture within a picture: the Google Ad for Google Ads does not have keywords in the description. Instead, this space is taken up by strong arguments for Google Ads such as ‘used by 1m+ businesses’ and ‘ Free Help to Start’. Also, note the use of caps on all of the words except prepositions to draw the eyes of searchers.

To secure top SEO ranking, you need content on your pages that contains the right keywords and serves the user as least as well as the other top ranking results. To get a good idea of the quality and length of the content you are up against, you should check out the content for as many of the top-ranking pages for the term you are targeting as possible. Each keyword term is different, and the longest content isn’t always the most likely to rank highly, but chances are if all the top-ranking results are 2000+ words — a couple of hundred words probably isn’t going to cut it.

Google Maps also features Google Ads. Notice the two Ads for Burger place nearby.

Keywords play an important role in SEO, and SEM competitor monitoring can really help to make keyword research more effective. SEO competitor monitoring can be used to find the keywords your rivals are using that you should also be targeting. The depth of the analysis you do with this will depend on your budget.

Some keyword tools allow you to see the keywords your competitors are ranking for, but you can also get a good idea of the keywords your competitors are targeting by visiting their website and paying close attention to the keywords used in the titles and subheadings on their pages, especially landing pages.

This SERP for SEA shows the importance of making sure you are not picking the wrong competition.

Competitor monitoring is also an important way of protecting the rankings you are holding for your SEO keywords. Monitoring the competition who are chasing your keywords will help you to be on the lookout for other sites that might threaten your top rankings. When we see a page jump up the rankings, we can check out its content and see if it includes any additional themes or contains extra engaging media, such as pictures and video, that we could also add to our content to maintain or even improve its rankings.

We can also use this approach to protect an advantage gained with Google Ads. For instance, monitoring your Google Ads and your competitors’ ads will help you to notice key shifts in strategy as soon as possible. For example, when rivals start outbidding you and pushing you out of prime positions for the terms you are targeting. You may then decide to up your bid to ensure your site still gets the top position, or adjust the settings of your ads so they launch at the time of the day when you get the best value or when your competitor is likely to have already exhausted their ads budget.

Link building is an important part of SEO and one of the best ways to get links to your website is through content collaboration. This is why monitoring your competitors' social media presence can help with SEO. If another website is willing to do an exchange with a rival from your industry, it’s likely they will also be interested in doing one with you. So using social media monitoring tools to check for your competitors latest collaborations is a good idea.

Social media analysis can also help with SEM since many social media platforms also offer display advertising. Tracking your competitors' activities on social media will help you to discover other channels you should run ads on. It will also draw your attention to the latest events and offers in your industry that you may also want to consider running ads for.

In conclusion, competitor monitoring is a vital source of insight for businesses of all sizes. It can point those learning about SEO and SEM in the right direction of best practices, as well as helping marketers to identify the best value keywords and target their marketing activities as effectively as possible.

Competitor monitoring on other marketing channels such as social media can also be a great way to identify potential backlink providers as well as inspiration for SEM, especially when it is conducted regularly with the help of digital marketing tools and software.