Getting a leading edge over competitors is the goal of any business. In a highly competitive marketplace, it can be difficult to distinguish your law practice and gain greater visibility among the clients you’re looking for.
Keeping an eye on your competitors is fundamental to positioning your law firm as an authority and building trust among your current and future clients.
The following are some of the most effective strategies for monitoring your competitors and improving the success of your law practice.
Know What You’re Looking For
Monitoring your competitors provides key advantages to your law firm. It sheds light on untapped marketing opportunities and the ones your competitors are missing.
By observing competitors over time, your law firm gains insight into the strategies that generate traffic to your website and increase the conversion of interested prospects into paying clients.
Monitoring your competitors lets you track your own performance against other law firms within your industry. Strategies that fail to make an impact can be avoided, and you can leverage those that actually work.
Use the feedback that audiences provide competitors to determine what questions and pain points your marketing campaigns need to address.
Competitive Keywords
Targeting the right keywords that are most relevant to your business helps you rank highly in the search results.
There are many tools available that let you monitor the keywords that your competitors are targeting. Alexa and SpyFu are examples of platforms that allow you to track the keywords of your competitors along with other factors such as traffic and backlinks.
You can identify what keywords they aren’t targeting and leverage that information in your own keyword and SEO strategy.
Tools such as AccuRanker let you track your keyword performance against those of your competitors. Over time, you optimize your keywords more specific to your industry.
Inbound Links
You can monitor the content of your competitors by tracking all inbound links pointing back to their site’s pages. Tools such as Moz’s Open Site Explorer make it easy to identify the backlinks of your competitors.
Other platforms such as LinkResearchTools let you set up notifications to monitor the backlinks your competitors receive. This information is used as a reference for obtaining new backlink sources you’ve yet to consider.
How Social Are Your Competitors?
Social media is one of the easiest ways to monitor the activity of your competitors. By tracking their social media pages, you can see what content is being shared and which ones get the highest number of shares, likes, and backlinks.
You’ll have a deeper understanding of the topics that your ideal clients are most interested in. Observing the ways in which competitors engage with their audiences is another way to optimize your own branding.
Twitter and Facebook have list functionalities. These make it easy to compile a list of competitors and track their activity without having to follow them or visit individual profile pages.
Other tools such as Tweetdeck and Hootsuite let you customize your social media feeds so that you can monitor your competitors in one convenient location.
Get Alerted
Your can also use Google alerts to monitor competitors. This free service allows you to create alert lists based on keywords, business names, URLs, and other factors related to competitors or your own law practice.
Whenever any activity occurs related to the items in your Google Alerts, you’ll receive an email notification, which lets you stay up-to-date on the activity of your competitors.
Monitoring competitors is something that many law firms overlook when trying to increase traffic to their businesses.
But knowing what your competitors are (or aren’t) doing right provides you with invaluable insight into the ways you can optimize your law firm’s marketing strategies.
If you’re having trouble keeping up with the competitors in your industry, let us know what challenges you’re facing in the comments below.
Monitoring and analyzing your competitors may be the missing element your firm needs to move closer to your business objectives.
