Competitor research and monitoring is a must for every financial business – but it’s not just about spying on their metrics and repeating their marketing moves. Competitive research can help you detect and implement trends, reveal gaps in the market and your own digital marketing strategies, and find new ways to attract leads.
Here are 10 essential financial SEO metrics you should be tracking, in order to keep ahead of your competitors.
1 – Company Overview and CEOs
You should understand basic information about your competitors, including their business location and the size of their staff. You’ll need this information to understand your own company’s growth against your rivals and how that may impact your performance.
2 – Revenue and Customers
Monitoring the fluctuations in your competitors’ revenue and the number of customers will help you scale your own expectations better. You can easily search your competitors’ names on Google to discover their revenue, their target audience, and how they compare with your brand.
3 – Geo-targeting
If you’re trying to conquer a competitive market it’s important to know what the landscape looks like and how it changes. Think about where your competitors have offices or stores? Where are their customers located? And, where is their traffic coming from?
4 – Reputation
Your competitor’s reputation describes how its customers evaluate the product or services. What are people saying about them? You can track their mentions on blog posts, discussion forums, news websites, and other web pages. Then compare this activity to the number of mentions you receive across all digital channels, so you can know if your marketing tactics are successful against the competition.
5 – Traffic Volume and Journey
If a lot of people are visiting their website, that usually means they have more opportunities to reach and convert someone into a customer. That’s why understanding their traffic volume is so important, as well as where it comes from. Traffic Journey helps you learn where your competitors’ website audience comes from and where they go next. This can help you understand how they attract their website visitors and which other actions they are connected to
6 – Search Rankings and Keywords
Organic traffic from search engines is one of your most powerful assets as it comes to you at no cost. Learn how your competitors are ranking in search engines and which keywords they’re using to see how you can outrank them. Analyze your website and competitor websites to see ranking keywords, the position on Google, website traffic, and performance on both desktop and mobile.
7 – Backlinks
Achieving high-quality backlinks has a major advantage to your SEO performance as they drive traffic to your website without any additional effort on your part. Knowing what backlinks your competitors have will help you to gather ideas for your link-building
8 – Engagement on Social Networks
Keeping an eye on your competitor’s social media engagement and follower counts will give you a good gauge of how effectively they are connecting with their audience using the medium. Go beyond just how many people are following your competitors to look at how many people are sharing, reacting to, and commenting on their posts. This will give you a better idea of how many people they’re actually reaching on social media and can help you choose which platforms to focus on.
9 – Paid Traffic
Similar to organic traffic, you’ll want to see what kind of paid traffic your competitors are enjoying. You need to find what campaigns and when your competitors are running, which keywords they use, and what landing pages they launch to determine where you can compete.
10 – Shared Audience
Analyzing the overlap between your competitors’ websites (or between your and your competitor’s website) will help you understand how big your new potential audience is and how easy it will be to attract people to your website. It will also give you further insight into where you stand in terms of market saturation against your competitors.
