How to Conduct Your Competitive Analysis N20
Categorize Your Competitors
As you find competitors, you’ll want to categorize them into various levels, from direct competitors to businesses that don’t currently compete with you but could easily start doing it.
Here is an easy way to categorize sellers in your industry:
- Primary Competition: These are your direct competitors, which means they’re either targeting the same audience or have a similar product — or both.
- Secondary Competition: These competitors may offer a high- or low-end version of your product, or sell something similar to a completely different audience. If you’re building a site for swingers, a secondary competitor might be a non-swinger site with couple profiles in it.
- Lesser Competition: This category includes businesses that are tangentially related to yours, and really comes in handy when you’re looking to expand your product catalog. These could be related products and services that are trending, as well as businesses that may be beneficial to partner with further down the line. For example, a tertiary competitor may be a markething company that sells traffic.
Examine your competitor’s website & customer experience
Once you’ve identified your competitors, you’ll want to analyze their websites and apps.
To start, take a close look at the following items:
- How detailed are their site descriptions? What information do they include? What information is missing?
- Where are their calls to action elements on the main landing page? Are they obvious or do they get lost due to a poor color scheme or positioning?
- Where are their social media icons positioned?
- Do they have a blog? How frequently do they post? What type of information do they publish?
- Is their site optimized for mobile?
- What methods for contact do they offer?
- How long does it take them to respond to email, live chat and contact form submissions?
- Do they have an abandoned cart saver feature? If so, at what moment do they send the emails and what messaging is included?
- What information is included in their marketing banners and callouts? This may help you start uncovering their competitive positioning within the market.
- How frequently are they running promotions? What benefits do those promotions provide to their customers and potential users?
Again, these are just to get you started.
Each website will be different depending on the niche they are working it and the services they are offering.
The goal here is to not only get a handle on their strengths and weaknesses, but to help you start thinking as a dynamic business owner.
From there, you’ll be able to identify your competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Identify your competitor’s market positioning
By identifying your competitor’s positioning strategy, you’ll start to get a feel for your market’s demands and expectations.
Take a look at their website and marketing messaging and ask the following:
- Why are users really buying from them? Are they going for the price? Experience?
- How are they differentiating their product from their competition? What features and benefits do they highlight the most?
- What makes their product or service unique (according to them)?
These questions will help you understand to whom your competitors are speaking and how they position themselves within the market, which will pay dividends as you work on how you’ll position yourself against or alongside them.
To gather as much information as possible, be sure to:
- Sign up on their site: Get an understanding of their business and examples of communication, which says a lot about the competitive environment.
- Subscribe to and follow their blog: See what types of content they are covering and at what cadence
- Follow them on social media: Get a feel for how they speak to and serve their customers
- Purchase a product or a service: Check out the product itself
Take a peek at pricing
You’ll learn what your target market is willing to pay and get an understanding of what prices might work well for your business.
Check the reviews
Take the time to find as many reviews of your competitors as possible, including everything from product reviews on their website to business reviews on social media to comments left on their blog.
Check how healthy and client-centric their business is and decide if it’s a strength or weakness you can capitalize on.
If you find a lot of reviews on a product similar to the one you’ll sell, it’s a good sign that people are interested in buying it.
If the reviews are from customers who aren’t happy with the service provided, the condition in which the product arrived, or the product quality, those could be ways to help differentiate your business.
Best site to do that are: https://www.trustpilot.comand https://www.capterra.com
Review social media.
If they have many followers, and especially if they are actively engaged, it’s a good sign that there is a market for your products.
Plus you’ll get a good idea of how customers feel about their business, and see what works well and what doesn’t for engaging with your own client base.
If your competitors don’t have a decent following, it could indicate that the market is weak, your target market doesn’t use social media, or simply that there is room for your business to take the lead at engaging with customers.
There is now no shortage of competitor analysis tools on the market, and each can offer insights relevant to its own particular niche and contribute to competitive benchmarking. Here is the list of tools that cover a range of areas, from paid adverts to email marketing.
General competitor analysis tools
While many tools target a particular niche, these tools analyze multiple areas of your competitor’s online marketing strategy to give you an overview of their efforts to spot potential avenues for growth.
Compare traffic, referrals, visitor behavior, keywords and search rankings, paid ads, and site by site social metrics.
Provides an overview of website traffic, referrals, search traffic and keywords, social media, display advertising, audience, and similar sites and apps.
SEO and keyword analysis Tools
As well as tracking backlinks and rankings, Spyfu has a great keyword feature showing how many keywords your competitors rank for and how much their keyword focus overlaps with yours.
Ahrefs is a great SEO and keyword research tool. You can use it to see what your competitors are ranking for, how much organic traffic they’re getting, and see what content of theirs is performing the best.
You can also compare domains to see content gaps, track specific keywords over time, while they’ve also added keyword data for sites like YouTube, Baidu, and Amazon.
Analysis shows a range of metrics around keywords, paid search, and rankings. You can search 10 URLs which will show limited results.
Backlink analysis tools
A wide range of link analysis is available, including an overview of backlinks, country and industry breakdown, and link age.
New links, lost links, new competitor’s links and weekly domain changes will all be emailed to you once you have set up your account.
Content discovery tools
BuzzSumo
The free tools allow you to search for content by keyword or entering a competitor’s URL. You can then refine the search by publish date, content type, and shares across social sites. It also has a trending section for different industries.
Paid advert and PPC tools
The tool identifies your top PPC competitors, reveals their monthly budget and entire Adwords strategy. You can access seven years worth of PPC and SEO keyword data.
Whatrunswhere
See where your competitors are advertising and what their ads look like, and how effective these adverts are. You can also access campaign data from 150,000 top performing display publishers.
Social media conversation tools
With detailed searches, categorization, rules, alerts, and over 85 million sites monitored, you can refine the platform to monitor what matters to you.
Facebook and Twitter channels allow you to monitor your competitor’s social media output. You can create searches to track all mentions of your competitors across the web, staying up to date with their content and news stories.
SERP rankings tools
Searchmetrics SEO visibility score which shows how well a domain is ranking. You can then chuck in some competitors to see how they’re performing too.
Web traffic tool
Founded 20 years ago and owned by Amazon, Alexa ranks sites based on their traffic volume. Alexa also provides metrics such as daily pageviews per visitor, bounce rate, time spent on site and demographics.
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