Competitors. They can be great teachers for those who are just starting out. They can be great role models for those wondering how much they can achieve. In general though, your goal is to beat the competition – or get as close to beating them as possible. It’s not productive to visit their Twitter account daily to see if they’ve got new followers, or going to Alexa to monitor their daily rankings. Fortunately, you can condense your competitor research time by getting all of the goods into one dashboard. In this post, we’re going to look at all of the ways you can keep on top of the competition, one widget at a time.

Monitoring the Competition’s Website

First, we’re going to start with some important website data pertaining to traffic and search. You can start by creating widgets for your competitor’s website traffic rankings on Alexa, along with their daily visitors measured by Quantcast. This can give you an idea of where your website ranks next to theirs.

You can also create widgets to monitor your competitor’s back links, mozRank, and rankings for specific keywords using the moz and SERPs widgets.This can give you an idea of how well your website ranks in search and authority compared to your competitors.

Combined, this can give you an idea of which competitors are getting the best traffic, links, and reputation in search. If you’re just starting out an SEO campaign, this will give you a clue as to which competitors you want to do some backlink research from first.

Monitoring the Competition’s Content Strategy

Content is an important part of any business’s marketing strategy, and one way to figure out what topic ideas would resonate well for your audience is to see what your competitor’s are writing about. Using the RSS widget, you can subscribe to your competitor’s blog and look at their latest topics alongside each other.

This can help you analyze topics along with how often your competitor’s update their blog and the opening line to each of their latest posts.

Monitoring the Competition’s Email Marketing Strategy

While you can’t monitor your competitor’s email marketing analytics (opens, clicks, etc.), you can see the headlines, copy, and frequency at which they email their list. Subscribe to your competitor’s mailing list using a dedicated Gmail address for just that purpose, and create a widget that will show you the latest unread messages in your inbox.

At a glance, you’ll be able to keep up with frequency and subject lines. You can then click through to see the emails that look the most interesting.

Monitoring the Competition’s Social Media Strategy

Want to keep up with your competitor’s followers and tweeting frequency? You can do just that with the Twitter overview widget.

You can also monitor the latest mentions of your competitors on Twitter, for better or worse. This can give you insight into customer support issues and how well affiliates promote your competitor’s products.

You can use the Instagram overview widget to monitor the number of photos shared and followers accumulated by your competitors.

You can monitor the same, but with pins and boards, for your competitors using the Pinterest overview widget.

These widgets can give you some insight into your competitor’s social media strategy including how active they are and how successful they are at gaining and engaging their audience.

Monitoring the Competition’s Reputation

Last, but not least, is your competitor’s reputation. Major news about your competition can lead to new business ideas and opportunities for you. Using Google Alerts, you can monitor your competitor’s latest mentions in the news.

This can give you insight into their latest talked about advertising strategies, new products and services, crises, and so much more. You can also use Google Alerts widgets to monitor mentions of your competitors in blogs to find out what sites might write about your business as well.

In Conclusion

Using a competitor monitoring dashboard can give you an insight into your competitor’s overall marketing strategy for content, email, search, and social media. Using the data you find here can help you figure out what strategies work, and which ones you need to start improving on for your own business. To create your own competitive dashboard, be sure to sign up for Cyfe today!