# Why Track Competitors
All SerpWatch users – regardless of their subscription plan – can track their Top 10 competitors for FREE. There is also no limit on how many paid competitors you can add.
Do you want to get ahead of your competitors in search results? Then you need to stay on top of their ranking movements!
Here are some of the ways tracking competitors in SerpWatch can help you improve your SEO and drive more traffic:
✔️ If you notice some of your competitors are climbing up the rankings, you can do more research to find out why they are growing and see what you can take from their growth; and if some of them are failing badly, you can learn from their mistakes.
✔️ You can plot competitors’ rankings on the graph and compare them side by side with yours; this means you can check rank data for all your important competitors with a quick glance and save hours of time on competitor analysis.
✔️ By plotting these results on the graph, you can easily keep track of which competitors are ranking above and below you for your target keyword.
✔️ Quickly spring to action and start looking for the reason your competitor moved up a position for an important keyword and use those findings to inform your own optimization decisions.
✔️ Correlate competitors’ ranking movements to the changes on their website and reverse engineer their success.
# How to Add Competitors
You can add competitors while creating a New Project or Editing an existing one or directly from the ranking chart.
# Add Competitors from the Project Setup
Click the “Add Competitor” button:
Enter a competitor’s domain:
If you want to add another competitor, click the button again and repeat the process:
# Add Competitors from the Ranking Chart
To add a new competitor domain, click the “+” button on top of the keyword ranking chart:
Enter your competitor’s domain in the designated field (1) and click “Add Competitor”:
NOTE: Each competitor you track will cost the same as the parent keyword.
This means that the cost of the new competitor you add will depend on the frequency of checks you set up for the parent keyword.
For example, if you set up the keyword to be checked on 2 devices and in 2 locations, this amounts to 4 checks and it means that tracking a competitor for that same keyword will also cost you 4 checks.
Read more about keyword check usage in the SerpWatch Pricing Model doc.
# How to Track Competitors’ Rankings
Open your project and click the keyword you want to check:
Click the Competitors tab to check your and your competitors’ rankings side by side:
By default, the data shown will be for the period of 1 month; however, you can change the time frame in the top left corner:
You can also set a custom time period for the results by using the date picker in the top right corner:
If you want to change the position range, choose one of the options from the drop-down menu; you can select the first 10, 20, 40, 60, 80, or 100 ranking positions, depending on how scattered your competitors are in search results:
# How to Filter Competitors
You will find all competitors you have added in the Filter domain dropdown box.
Here, you can turn the competitors’ rankings on and off – simply click the domains you want to filter out.
Keep in mind that we will still keep monitoring these domains — you just won’t see them on the chart.
TIP: You can also filter competitor domains in your project-level keyword list.
# How to Delete Competitors
To delete a paid competitor from the ranking chart, click the trash can icon:
Select the competitor(s) you want to delete:
Click “Delete”:
