Using software to track your competitors

We all have competitors out there who often rank above us on the search engines and seem to be able to attract more visitors. But to a business owner it can be very frustrating and sometime shard to understand why a business that is smaller than us in terms of staff and turn over etc, can be doing so well on the search engines.

The search engines all have their own ranking algorithm to sort out who appears where when a phrase is searched for. Geographical location has recently become a big player in this area, meaning if you are trying to target locations other than where you are based, you may have to work that bit harder.

There are many tools and software out there that will allow you to track your competitors in terms of their rankings, back links, page rank and content. Using these tools can sometimes give you an overview of what they may be doing that pushes them in front of you. It is not always to say what they are doing is correct though, and taking on techniques that could be seen as spamming could actually get your site black listed and removed from the search engines altogether.