Tracking competitors for SEO improvements

[andreicomoti]

Hello,

Is there a tool or a practical method to track a competitor SEO strategy in terms of changes on their website over time.

Example:

If a competitor decides to change their site architecture or rewrite their meta data on all the URLs on their website etc.

I know that most SEO tools offer keyword and backlink tracking, but such information is not of too much help if it does not have a context in the background.

I am looking for a fast and efficient way to monitor any kind of SEO changes on the competitor website.

Thanks in advance!

[lammert]

Write your own bot?

On a more serious note. The idea that you need to track your competitor on this detail level is an indication that you find your own presence inferior to theirs. Stop thinking that way. Don't think in terms of competing in the SERPs but dominating the SERPs. That will take off the focus from what the competition does to focus on your own operation. And that is where your growth is.

[aristotle]

Pay no attention to what other people do with their websites. Spend your time working on improving your own sites. Use your own ideas and your own standards. You should want your sites to stand out from the crowd. In other words, don't try to copy what other people do.

[FranticFish]

Even if you did this for every site in the SERP I'm not sure the information would be useful enough to repay the investment of time collecting and analysing the data.

How do you know you're tracking the same things that Google tracks? Or applying the same weight to them?

Say a site makes a change and then its position rises - how do you know it is rising because the change it made was seen to be positive? It could be because other sites made changes seen to be negative i.e. the site rose because others fell.

Say a site makes a change but also acquires or loses links. How will you tell whether it's the on-site changes or the change to its links profile? Again, you can't look at links in isolation. The link profiles of ALL the sites in the SERP are subject to change. And, you cannot assume that because a site gains (or loses) links that those new links are responsible for the change: they might not be counted by Google (or they they will be counted but not straight away) - or they might have been ignored so the loss makes no difference. Then, even where the number of links a site has doesn't change the weighting Google gives to them can change.

Not only that, you can never be certain you have a complete picture of a website's links because third party link discovery bots don't have the index size Google does (I read a few years back that it might be as small as 20-30% in some instances).

All changes need to be tracked for every site in the SERP, for every site that links to every site in the SERP, and so on. It's pretty much an impossible task.

[jediviper]

Yes there are such tools.
I remember there was a website which was tracking changes for the On-page SEO, content etc. But I can't remember the url though, will need to check it.

What I would like to know about competitors is their PBN what links to their money pages. And that's something that is really hard to find if they block the bots from Ahrefs, semruch etc.