SEO Warrior

Competitor Tracking

In the previous sections, we discussed the different tools and methodologies of researching and analyzing your competitors. In this section, we’ll discuss how to track your competitors. You can track your competitors in many ways. First we’ll address how you may want to track a competitor’s current state, and then we’ll talk about future tracking.

Current State Competitor Auditing

When collecting current state competitor data, it helps to use an Excel spreadsheet. For example, you can create a spreadsheet to capture keywords alongside the top URLs and other related metrics. Figure 13-19 shows one such example.

Figure 13-19. Keyword-based basic research template

In this template, you can enter the keyword, URL, IP address, Yahoo! inlinks, Google PageRank, Google index size, AdWords estimated monthly volume, “inurl” index count, “intitle” index count, and “inanchor” index count. Note that the URL would be the top URL for a particular keyword on a particular search engine. You can reuse this template for all of the major search engines.

You can also take a much more detailed approach by using the template shown in Figure 13-20. In this case, you are using similar information with several major differences. You are recording the top 10 or 20 competitors for every keyword. You are also recording the number of backlinks (BLs) as well as the number of other backlinks (OBLs) ...