Competitor SEO tracking usually gets sold as a dashboard of everything a rival does. What is useful is much narrower: for the handful of queries you are actually going after, who is above you, and has that changed. You can do that by hand for a few dozen queries in an afternoon a month, and the record it leaves is more useful than a feed you skim, because it is about your queries rather than their whole site.
Pick the queries first, not the competitors
The sites that outrank you differ from query to query, and the ones that consistently sit above you across a cluster are the only ones worth naming as competitors at all. Start from the ten or twenty queries you have aimed pages at, look at who holds them, and let the list of rivals fall out of that. Chosen the other way round, you end up tracking a big brand that competes with you for nothing.
Record the shape of the page above you, not just its name
What you want from serp competitors ranking above you is a reason. Is the page that beats you longer, more specific, more recent, better matched to the intent, or simply on a much stronger domain? One line per query about what the winning page is doing is worth more than any metric, because it is the thing you can act on when you rewrite.
Know what this cannot tell you
You cannot see their traffic, their conversion rate or their revenue, and estimates of those are guesses dressed up. You also cannot tell whether a page ranks because of what is on it or because of the site it sits on. Treat competitor tracking as evidence about intent and page shape, and be suspicious of anything that claims to tell you what a rival earns.
Keep it beside your own positions
The reason to keep competitor readings in the same record as your own is that the useful fact is relative. Losing two places while the page above you was replaced by a different site is a different story from losing two places to the same incumbent, and only a record with both in it can tell them apart.
Questions people ask about competitor seo tracking
How many competitors should I track?
Two or three per cluster, chosen because they actually hold your queries. A longer list becomes a report nobody reads.
Can I see how much traffic a competitor gets?
No, and neither can any tool: what is offered is a model built from sampled ranking data. It can be useful as a rough ordering and it should never be quoted as a fact.
Is competitor tracking the same as rank tracking?
It is the same reading taken about somebody else's page. The difference is what you record next to it, which is why the page above you wins rather than the number alone.
Does Longtailo watch competitors for me?
No. It keeps what you observed, against the query and the date, so the comparison over time exists. The looking is yours.