A Can question

Can an SEO company track competitor performance?

3 min read Cites 2 sources

Yes, within limits worth understanding before you pay for it. An SEO company cannot see a competitor’s analytics, revenue, or conversion rates. It can follow the signals that are visible from outside: where competitors rank, what they publish, which sites link to them, and, in two cases, data that is actually measured rather than estimated. Knowing which numbers are which is the difference between useful competitor tracking and a report full of confident guesses.

What can be tracked, and how reliable it is

Rankings for a defined list of keywords can be checked for any site, yours or a competitor’s, with a rank tracker. Grouped across many keywords, they show whether a competitor is gaining or losing ground on the searches that matter to you.

Content changes are visible too: new pages, updated pages, and topics a competitor has started to rank for. So are links, through third-party link indexes that record when a competitor gains or loses linking sites.

Traffic figures for a competitor are a different matter. Third-party tools estimate them from their own data and models, and no outside tool can see the competitor’s actual analytics. Treat those figures as a guide to direction and relative size, not as counts.

Two kinds of competitor data that are measured

Page speed data from real visitors is public. The Chrome User Experience Report, the dataset behind Core Web Vitals, is described in Google’s CrUX documentation this way: “The data collected by CrUX is available publicly through a number of Google tools and third-party tools and is used by Google Search to inform the page experience ranking factor.” That means a competitor’s loading and responsiveness figures can be read from the same source as yours. The same documentation notes that “not all origins or pages are represented in the dataset”, so some sites have no data at all.

Paid search activity is also visible. Google’s Ads policy page on advertiser verification states that “ads served on Google platforms, such as Google Search and YouTube, can be found in the Ads Transparency Center.” If a competitor’s organic visibility shifts, checking whether it has started or stopped advertising is a useful part of the picture.

How tracking should be delivered

Useful tracking is set up once and reviewed on a schedule. The company and you agree on a competitor set, which may differ from your business competitors because the sites that rank for your searches are not always the companies you compete with for customers. It builds the keyword list, records a starting position, and then reports movement next to your own figures.

Alerts can supplement scheduled reports. Ask the company to set thresholds for changes worth hearing about straight away, such as a competitor jumping several positions on your most important searches or gaining a burst of links, so you are not waiting for the next monthly report to learn about them.

Making competitor tracking lead to a decision

Ask which competitors the company would track and why, which figures in its reports are measured and which are estimated, how often you will see the comparison, and what triggers an alert. Above all, ask what it does with the information. Competitor data is worth paying for when it leads to a decision about your own pages; a chart that only shows a rival moving up does not.

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