Why track competitors?
If you own a website, you may want to track the performance of the other websites in the same industry as yours for comparison, analysis purposes, and more. For example, their keyword rankings as compared to yours.
On this page:
Setting up and adding competitors
Nightwatch provides the ability to set up your competitors to monitor their search rankings easily and compare them with yours. Adding competitors to your websites or URLs will not affect the total number of tracked keywords. You can track up to 5 competitors on your account.
You can add your competitors when adding your URL for the first time, during the onboarding process, or you can add/remove/adjust their settings at any time later on.
Here’s how you can set up competitors to track:
Click into a preferred URL dashboard or All Keywords view,
Click the settings icon next to the Overview,
Enter the URLs of your competitors in the competitors tab (optionally, you can also add their Google Place name, Carousel Title, and even add a custom name for each of them),
You can also enable the Auto-discover Competitors feature, and the tool will find them for you.
Review them,
Click "Save."
Auto-discover competitors
Nightwatch can auto-discover competitors as well. If you'd like to take advantage of this feature, click the "Auto Discover" button as you add your competitors.
If you would like to track their Google My Business and Google Carousel rankings, make sure to fill these fields in. |
Tracking competitor data
As soon as you added the competitors for a URL, two sections will be enabled for you in Nightwatch where you can see competitor data:
Keyword column section
To activate and see the competitor data at the keyword section, follow the next steps:
Click on a pencil icon on a column,
At the bottom of the list, you will see the competitor name and choose one of its dimensions:
Rank,
Organic Rank,
Image Carousel Rank,
Local Pack Rank,
Last change or
Day / Week / Month change.
Graph section
Nightwatch can also help you track your competitors’ performance against yours, and present it in a graph for you to see. You can filter the graph to your preference and range of time to analyze the data further as well.
To access it, under "Graphs" click the default title “Competitor rankings" at the left sidebar:
Note: Please ensure that you wait for 1 day before you try to access the competitor data (as Nightwatch will need to do another crawl to start tracking competitors). |
Check out these articles to learn more about:
Check out our tutorial video on YouTube: