Competitor analysis is an assessment of your competitor companies’ online marketing strategy in order to understand their weaknesses and strengths and compare them with your own strategy.
There are many aspects that you need to take into consideration in order to have a thorough competitor evaluation. It is better not to go into analytics regarding every single detail, you should look at and focus on the areas that are most relevant to you. Keep in mind that even the most successful companies tend to focus on certain aspects and don’t necessarily do a good job on all existing marketing channels – your task is to find the best ones and do a thorough analysis on them.
As a first step, search for your own product and the related keywords in Google, so you will have an idea in a few minutes – you can create a list of your competitors narrowing it down to 4-5 top competitors. Remember to focus on the organic search results only. It is always a good idea to check some companies who might be out of your league but knowing your limits is essential for success. Once you have narrowed down your competitors to 4-5 players, compare them, do a little analysis on their marketing strategy, and see what you need to improve on your own strategy to rank your site near their position or, ideally, to get ahead of them.
Based on personal experience, we recommend that your analysis should consist of the following steps:
1)Look at the Big Picture
2) Perform SEO analysis on your competitors’ websites
3) Look at the advertising tools they use
4) Analyze the content
5) Check their social signals
The Big Picture
The essence of this step is to get an overall view of the market. Make a list of your best, most successful competitors with whom you can compare your business. See how active your competitors are, who their partners are. Check the inbound traffic of their websites, their sources, and see what backlinks they are getting from other pages. Meanwhile it’s worth checking whether the product you and your competitors offer show regional or seasonal trends. If you manage to get an idea of the main trends in a given product market, it will be easier to find growth opportunities. By looking at these key metrics on your own website, you can also get a great insight into user behavior,which you can use to your advantage later.
SEO – Search Engine Optimization
As far as information is concerned, analyzing your competitors can provide you with a gold mine. If you manage to look at every aspect of their SEO strategy and design the most successful elements for yourself, it will help you increase traffic to your website quickly. With the help of SEO analysis you can find the weaknesses, not just the strengths of your competitors and you can exploit them in the future. Once you have found their strengths, you can copy them to your own image. The data collected includes SEO metrics such as domain authority, how much traffic is coming to each competitor’s website, which keywords bring in the most traffic, and it’s also important to check deeply your competitors’ backlink profiles.
Remember that the design of your website, its appearance matters a lot. If you see that your competitors’ websites are nicely designed, mobile friendly, easy to navigate, then it’s time to invest a little in your own. Yes, if you have opened a small local shop, this applies to you as well! Many small businesses are still not paying attention to having a mobile friendly website, for example. In fact, many websites have designs that look like they were made in the ’90s. This needs to be changed as soon as possible.
The next thing to look at on a particular website is how often keywords are used – this will give you guidance on how aggressive you need to be with the density of your keywords. Obviously, you should be careful with this as Google’s algorithm can penalize web pages that do not serve valuable content but only stuff posts and pages with keywords. So if you want your site to rank well, it’s more important that your content is useful to your readers, users.
Now let’s move on to backlinks. Nowadays, a backlink profile tells a lot about a business and these links play a significant role in building an online presence. The purpose of backlink analysis is to see which web pages are related to your competitors but not to you. This data is vital and allows us to close any existing gaps between our competitors and our own backlink profile – this will increase our own chances of ranking better by getting links from websites that already link to our competitors.
Ads
Launching an effective PPC (pay-per-click) campaign requires a lot of preparation and prior analysis but it can be a very effective way to drive traffic to our website. Therefore, always examine how competing companies are performing in this area. During the process you need to find out which keywords your rivals are bidding on. It is worth analyzing the landing pages of the ads as well. If you simply direct traffic to your homepage through ads while your competitors have built a very well-designed, eye-catching landing page that utilizes SEO in every possible way, there is little hope for success.
Content
Analyzing the content of your competitors’ websites usually takes a considerable amount of time but it will help you create a content strategy that will allow you to catch up or even overtake them over time.
Start by analyzing how their content is allocated on the different webpages. When you’re done, you can start checking the content. This will be the most time-consuming part of the process but it will show you the direction you should take to improve your content. Basically there are three things to look at in a content audit:
a) The amount of content. Scan how many blog posts have been published by competitors, how many case studies are available or how many e-books have been written. This will help you determine how much you need to catch up with the amount of content you have.
b) Frequency of publication. With this step you will see how often the competing sites publish posts: twice a week, twice a day, etc. I know that you will not find the exact date for each post, but you will be able to determine it more or less, for example by looking at the date of the first comments.
c) Topics. The purpose of this audit is to determine which topics the competing websites are writing about in their content. This way you can find subjects that have not been exploited yet and you can try to get a good position in Google’s search results page.
Finally, look at the structure of each blog. Website blogging is one of the most significant marketing tools for increasing inbound traffic to a website, so analyzing the structure of each blog can give you a sharp insight into the amount of work you need to do.
Social Media
Social media is today inseparable from an online marketing strategy, so it is essential to deeply go through your competitors’ presence in social media. If you see a competitor using a social media channel that you previously thought might not be useful for your brand or product (such as Pinterest) in a very creative and effective way, then it’s time to get in the game.
Check your competitors’ social media presence, how many followers they have, how often they post, and how actively they interact with the audience. Social media can be a great way to promote your content, yet many businesses ignore it – don’t make the same mistake.
Being active on social media does not automatically mean engagement with the audience. There is a huge difference between an active social media platform and an active audience. From a marketing point of view it’s more important to have active followers who are liking, commenting and sharing your content than just keep on posting every day without any interaction from the audience.
Your social media presence is inseparable from the overall online marketing strategy. You need to scrutinize these areas not only to analyze your competitors but also to understand your own performance.
Closing words
The ultimate goal of competitor analysis is to utilize all the information gathered. An effective competitor analysis requires a lot of work but you can win a lot. You can get rid of blind spots and improve the quality of your online presence. Once you have analyzed how your competitors work, use the data to your advantage and incorporate the best methods into your strategy.