8 Easy Ways To Monitor The SEO Your Competition Is Doing

If you’re a marketer and you’re currently tied up with other initiatives (campaigns, new site launch, etc.), or a search professional bogged down with doing keyword research, a technical audit, or staying up with the latest trends, remember to come up for air every now and then (at least once a month if not more) to take a look at what your competition is doing. Here’s some tips on how to effectively go about this.

To start, take a look at your existing keyword landscape and identify your “Top 10″ Keywords. These are terms that you have deemed business critical to have a top ranking position for. Odds are, you will probably not have a #1 ranking for each term. In the cases where you don’t, take a look at what sites are outranking yours and determine why.

You can do this in a variety of ways. You could manually look at each site, review the content, look at links, etc., but that tends to take too much time. There’s a simple way to go about this that you can use within your existing monthly production cycle.

Install a tool like SEOQuake. Once the tool is installed and turned on (via your browser), perform a search on one of your important Keywords. For each ranking site, you will be able to see important ranking factors. For example, look at the following elements:

1. How many links are pointing to the competitor’s ranking page?
2. How many of these links are using the target keyword?
3. How many of these links are owned by the competitor’s brand (such as family domains or links from the same site)?
4. When did the page originate (you can determine this by using the WayBack Machine)?
5. How many Delicious or DIGG listings does the competitor site have?
6. Does the competitor site have a DMOZ listing?
7. OnPage Factors – does the competitor site have well optimized content (Title, URL, body content, etc.)?
8. You can then determine which of these ranking factors are giving your competition the benefit by doing a side-by-side comparison against your site. Create a Matrix and list out 4-5 competitor sites for each of your important keywords. You’d be surprised how useful this can be in determining your strategy and next steps. For example:
9. Modify your content if needed to be better optimized for the target keyword
10. Create a PR or Social Media campaign aimed at generating awareness (and thus, links) to your content using important keywords.
11. Doing this on a monthly basis will ensure that you (and your stakeholders) have a clear road map for success with those business critical keywords. 

Types of Clocking Methods

Cloaking generally means to present different version of web page contents from of search engines to search robots and human visitors based on their browser's user agent or IP address. It's a deceptive method used to cheat search engines in order to rank well for desired keywords.

Not always but in most of the cases, cloaking is also used to trick users to visit certain websites based on their description in search engines. For example a user searching for some product may click on a website in search engine based on its description and title but the final website will not be the one described in SERP's. It will be a totally different one. Therefore, these practices that are designed to manipulate search engines and deceive users by directing them to sites other than the ones they selected, and that provide content solely for the benefit of search engines should be avoided.

Check if a site is cloaking or not: Free Online Cloaking Checker

Different Cloaking Methods:

IP address Cloaking - a method of presenting different contents based on determining IP addresses. e.g. Search engines with certain IP addresses will be shown a one version of a web page and all other IP addresses will be shown another version.

User-Agent Cloaking - a method of delivering different versions of a website based on User-Agent. e.g. Search engines and/or users using different versions of web browsers are served with different contents of a web page.

HTTP_REFERER Header Cloaking - if a user is coming from a certain website (e.g. clicking a link from search results or a website) they will be presented a different version of a website based on the HTTP_REFERER header value.

HTTP Accept-Language Header Cloaking - may be used to show different versions of a website based on a users web browser language without letting them for an option of language selection.

JavaScript Cloaking - users with JavaScript enabled browsers are shown one version while users with JavaScript turned off (like search engines) are shown another version of a website.

Finally, cloaking can be a dangerous thing so be careful while using it.