The need has arisen within our organisation to monitor (on a daily basis) where our site appears (both organic and PPC) on the page 1 of Google. Also where a key competitor appears. For certain key words.

In the immediate short term a colleague is doing this by hitting Google manually and jotting down the results. Yep.

It occurs to us we can write a script (e.g. using C#) to do this.

I know Analytics will tell us an awful lot but it doesn't note the competitor's position, plus I don't think it has other data we want.

Question is, is there an existing basic tool which does this (for free, I guess)? And if we write it ourselves, where to start and are there obvious pitfalls to avoid (for example can Google detect and block automated requests?)