Importance of Monitoring Your Competitors' Websites for SEO

Rank checking is one of the important aspects of SEO which helps understand how your SEO strategies are running. It is important to keep an eye on them as there are so many variables at play that it helps you to appropriately react to them in case there are big changes. Similarly, it is also important to track your competitors’ websites and to look for interesting changes like ling building, their structure, markups, etc. and even if the changes are smaller, and sometimes even negative, it is quite helpful to know them.

What is the Importance?

Monitoring your competitors’ websites serve multiple purposes. They should not be done regularly though, but keeping an eye over them will surely yield positive results for you. This will help you in identifying any rise in the visibility of their sites with the help of searchmetrics. And based upon the visibility findings, you can observe the link building activities carried out lately on your competitors’ websites and find out the code of the competitors sites. By frequently taking pictures of your competitors’ sites, you can observe your data and find explanations based on what changes they have made and carry out the same changes to yield extra benefits.

What You Can Observe:

You can carry out the content of your competitors’ sites if viable, but for large sites, it may not be possible all the times. So, you can observe the changes they make on the codes and the IA updates to make the things easier. You can further observe the category pages, search page, the product pages, and the site map to get the overall idea of the sites’ performance. You can also look for the structure markup or microformats, changes to internal linking and crawlability, meta changes, etc.

What You Can Do:

So, you now know what to look for and do. But, how to do it?

What you can do is to visit the competitors’ sites and take some screenshots of the main pages to save them and observe at some later time. You can save them as simple HTML pages or as full page with all the data on it. Saving as full page will help you in comparing any changes in future and so that is a better option.

So, these are some of the benefits of monitoring your competitors’ websites for the purpose of SEO. Observing their sites in a methodical manner will yield rich rewards for your business. And if there are any positive activities that result in increased rankings, you can definitely leverage upon your observation as you can make appropriate changes to your SEO strategies based upon your findings.