If you want to stay ahead of your competition, learn as much information as you can about them – and here’s how to do it:
1. Discover what “Keywords” are driving traffic their way
Finding out what keywords your competitors are using is a great way of understanding their target audiences – and to give you an idea of what is driving certain traffic and sales their way instead of yours. As many keywords are placed in the metadata on business websites it is easy to take a look at them by simply looking at the source code. Enter the Chrome browser and go to View – Developer – View Source. Then press CTRL + F to search for keywords.
2. Check out mobile views and load-times
Sources such as “Google page Insights” display load-times of websites, and you can use this information to gauge whether your website loads slower or faster than your competitor’s. Speed metrics can also allow you to check out who’s ahead of the mobile curve.
3. More or less indexed pages
SERPs performance can improve dramatically if you increase the amount of your website’s indexed pages, so check out how many your competitors have to determine why they might be ahead of you in the rankings.
4. Assess their Twitter presence
Whilst sometimes the number of Twitter followers a business has can be a false indicator of popularity – if they’ve got more than you there’s a fair chance you’re losing sales to them. Have a good look at the quality of their posts and how many retweets they get. If the posts are better than yours – get writing.
5. Look at their advertisements
Try checking out your competitor’s advertising campaigns on Moat.com – and it will give you a good idea if you can compete on that level and budget, or have to come up with alternative plans.
6. Want to know what services they’re using?
Head to builtwith.com to check out what service provider your competitors are using, whether it’s Outbrain, Nginx or any other provider. You can find out things such as what affiliate relationships they have and all about their CMS.
7. Learn what website changes they made
If you want to see how quickly a competitor website is evolving then head to the Wayback Machine which shows what a website looked like on any date.
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