Competition tracking (multiple URLs)

How to monitor the rankings of several sites within one Rank Tracker project

Rank Tracker lets you manage up to 10 additional URLs within a single project (view sample Competitors’ Rankings Report). Although these may be both competitors’ websites and websites (sections of a website) belonging to the same person/company, in this help tutorial we’ll jointly refer to all of these additional URLs as “competitors”.

Adding competitors

Here is how to enable competition tracking:

1. Open a project created for the main site (the one you are primarily focused on).
2. Go to Preferences -> Competitors. Click Add (it will activate the Add Competitor menu).

Adding Competitor(s) to Rank Tracker Project: Click Add

3. Fill out the fields:
   
   
   • The web address of your competitor.
   • Short name and color identifier (to be used on progress graphs and in reports).

Adding Competitor to Project: Fill out Competitor’s Profile

4. Select applicable options from the following:
   
   
   • Include into reports and exports. Although the results of all ranking checks will be saved to your project file, you can choose if you want them shown in data export files and ranking reports.
   • Include rankings of subdomains. Search engines treat subdomains (e.g. www.blog.domain.com and www.domain.com) as different sites. Selecting this option will prompt Rank Tracker to track both the primary version and the subdomain within the same project.
   • Treat www and non-www versions of the domain as the same site. Sometimes there may be several versions of the same page in search results: one with the www part (http://www.domain.com/) and one without it (http://domain.com). When this feature is on, Rank Tracker will consider such URLs as belonging to the same site and will show you which one comes first on search results pages.

Once you have filled out your competitors’ profiles, Rank Tracker will automatically include them into all ranking checks. So to find out how your site is ranking against the competitors, simply check your rankings as usual.

Displaying competitors’ data in active workspace

Please use the Show Competitors button to display competitors’ ranking positions in the active workspace. You can turn the feature on and off as convenient. If no competitors have been added to the project, the button will be grayed out.

Keywords toolbar: Show Competitors option

The rankings of the competing websites will appear next to yours in the search results table.

All keywords (detailed view): competitors’ history changes

Editing competitors

To change how a competitor appears in your project, please select its profile from Preferences -> Competitors and click Edit.

Edit command in Competitors menu

Using the Edit Competitor menu that opens up, you will be able to change the name, color identifier and project settings for the chosen competitor.

Edit Competitor menu

The URL itself cannot be changed (this would disassociate it from its ranking data). So if you would like to use a different URL for a competing site, you will need to create a new profile for it.

Removing competitors

To delete a competitor’s URL from a project, please access the list of competitors under Preferences -> Competitors and hit the Remove button.

You can use the Delete key on your keyboard in the same way.

Delete selected competitor

Want to see the features in action? Check out our 3-minute competition tracking video.