A quick guide for digital businesses that might want to know what their competitors are up to, in order to stay abreast with the latest developments online.
Google alerts
This tool enables one to monitor the internet for trending and interesting content. All one has to do is set up alerts for specific industry by using keywords. Google Alerts also allows its users to customize the email reports they receive by letting them monitor often they’d like the notifications, type of sources, the origin of source, and languages. This tool is also very useful when one has to know or be alert about specific topics. One can enable alerts for their competitors and can see when and how they appear on search engines.
Facebook ‘Pages to Watch’
Page admins on Facebook can monitor or “watch” the activities of competitor pages. To add a competitor page, one simply needs to go to ‘Page Insights’, scroll to the bottom and type in the name of the business whose updates they would like to stay abreast with. Users can also see the company’s follower growth, engagement, the competitors’ top posts from previous week. One can also create a personal list, wherein they choose at least five other pages to watch. Asiacom recommends to have a large list so that one can perfectly fine tune their campaigns and monitor the competitors Facebook activity
Hootsuite
A simple social media publishing tool, Hootsuite offers numerous in-platform apps to increase overall user experience. Another app Trendspottr enables one to set up multiple streams on their Hootsuite dashboard, and watch trending topics, keywords, brand reputation and even identify industry influencers. This tool is widely used by digital agencies and is also recommended by us for the purpose of managing social portfolios integrating all social media channels and managing them from one place. With facilities like; post scheduling, analytics this tool is a must for every digital marketer.
Alexa
Alexa is helpful for those who want to analyse the overall reach of the company they are going to be working with. It can be used to analytically measure competition – one can see how the competitor’s website is ranking globally, regionally, what keyword searches are driving traffic to their site, which pages are generating the highest engagement, and which sites link to the competitor’s site. Though Alexa shows traffic and analytics reports only when the sites are ranked above 100,000. But once users qualify this they have access to engagement rates, search traffic, unique visitors, audience geography and other related metrics.
SEM Rush
SEM Rush offers analytical reporting on all aspects of digital marketing performance. Using their free account, users can see their competitors’ rankings, the keywords that are generating traffic, and also view their AdWords and video ad campaigns. For SEO professionals- one can view these elements:
- Technical SEO Audit
- Semantic core collection
- Ideas for gaining more organic traffic
- Position Tracking
Using this tool users can also see paid traffic campaigns, social media, content and press releases.