Doing business has become much easier thanks to the Internet. Anyone with an internet connection and a phone can now start a business. While it may appear that this is the perfect time to start a business, we should not disregard the reality that it has increased market noise. And the competition is fiercer than ever.

You must know and understand your competition in the market to get a competitive edge over the market. But how do you do that?? By performing a competitive analysis.

What is Competition Analysis?

A competitive analysis is a method that involves investigating significant competitors to learn about their products, sales, and marketing strategies. Conducting a competitive market analysis has a number of advantages, including strengthening corporate strategies, fending off competitors, and grabbing market share.

A competitive study can help you understand how your competitors operate and suggest areas where you might be able to outperform them.

It also allows you to remain on top of industry trends and ensure that your product meets — and exceeds — market standards on a consistent basis.

Why Competition Analysis is Important?

Conducting a competitor analysis is critical for not just matching your competitors but also providing you with an advantage over them. When it comes to competitor analysis, being proactive rather than reactive is critical to your business’s success, or any business’s success for that matter.

Small business owners frequently find themselves juggling multiple jobs at the same time. Even if you have a hectic schedule, it’s worthwhile to conduct a competitive analysis. It can benefit your company by assisting you with:

• Determine the strengths and weaknesses of your company.
• Recognize your competition.
• Recognize industry trends.
• Set goals for future expansion.

1. Determine the strengths and weaknesses of your company.

You can draw conclusions about your own brand’s strengths and flaws by examining how your competitors are viewed. Knowing your company’s strengths can help you determine your market positioning or the mental image of your product or service you want members of your target audience to have. It’s critical to explain to potential clients why your product or service is the greatest option among the alternatives.

It’s just as crucial to be aware of your company’s flaws as it is to help it thrive. Knowing where you fall short of your consumers’ expectations might help you find areas where you should spend time and money.

Customers may prefer the customer service of your competitors, for example. Examine your competitors to understand what they’re doing properly and how you can apply it to your own firm.

2. Recognise Your Competition.

While identifying competitors, you may come across companies you weren’t aware of or didn’t consider competitors before. Understanding who your competition are is the first step in outperforming them.

Examining what your competitors have to offer might also help you uncover areas where your market is neglected. If you notice gaps between what your competitors offer and what customers want, you may be the first to fill those gaps by expanding your own products.

3. Recognise Industry Trends.

Examining the competition can also assist you in determining the direction in which the industry is heading. However, you should never follow in the footsteps of your competition. Copying the competitors without thinking about your own market position seldom, if ever, results in success.

If you notice something that your competitors are doing that you aren’t, don’t try to copy them. Instead, think about what your customers want and how you might provide those demands. When everyone else zigs, it’s generally preferable to zag.

4. Set Goals For Future Expansion

When conducting a competitor study, make sure to include both larger and smaller businesses. Examining well-established organisations in your field can provide you with a model of success and a benchmark against which to measure future progress. Researching new entries into your business, on the other hand, reveals which companies may pose a future danger to your market share.

When is it appropriate to conduct a competitive analysis?

When launching a new firm, it’s always a good idea to conduct a thorough competitive study. A competition study, on the other hand, isn’t just for startups. It’s a tool that can — and should — be utilised at any point in a company’s life cycle. Returning back and revising your competition analysis, or doing one from scratch, on a regular basis will help you spot new market trends and keep a competitive advantage over your competitors.

How To Do Competition Analysis?

If you are thinking about how to do competition analysis? Read this article till the end to discover the four stages of competition analysis.

Website Analysis

Competition website analysis is exactly what it sounds like: you examine your competitors’ marketing plans and approaches on their websites. The goal is to figure out how to use your marketing to match or even outperform theirs.

You may monitor your competition in a variety of ways, from a quick check at the search results for a term to a full-fledged, software-driven analysis. Regardless, the idea is to stay up to date on what they’re up to.

Why you should do a competitor website analysis?

You’ll want to know when your competitors use new and effective techniques. Any successful tactic they utilise will harm your marketing, and the only way to combat it is to figure out what it is and respond appropriately.

Naturally, competition analysis can reveal what your rivals aren’t doing. It can show you where their marketing is lacking so you can improve your campaigns to capitalise on those flaws. Competitor analysis, in whatever form, is a vital strategy for staying ahead of the competition.

How to do a competitor site analysis?

How do you go about conducting a website competitive analysis? When you wish to study your competitors’ websites, there are four actions you should do.

1. Identify your competitors

It’s difficult to keep track of competitors if you don’t even know their names. As a result, you must first identify your competitors before proceeding. You may already be aware of a few direct competitors, in which case you can name them right away.

However, you’ll want to do some additional in-depth study to make sure you know which companies to keep an eye on. Because you’re trying to evaluate websites, the best way to locate your competition is to look at which companies’ websites have the highest Google rankings. Try looking for some keywords connected to your industry.

For example, if you are a digital marketer, try searching “digital marketer.”

Then see which sites have the best rankings for those keywords. The findings should provide you with a comprehensive list of rivals to consider.

You can see a lot of Google AdWords, local search results, and organic results (SEO) in the above image, so there’s a lot to look at. Because we’re looking at websites, the first thing we did was to identify the top five online competitors. So, if you look closely, you can see that these are the firms that are focusing on the same keyword, which we should also be focusing on. There is three things to bear in mind before proceeding, and that is Google AdWords ads, local search results, and organic results. In our marketing mix, these three factors will be the most crucial.

Now before we look at some real-life websites and go through the website competitor analysis process, we would like to share four questions that we’re going to be using as the basis of our analysis.

• Does this site look modern and appealing?
• Is the target audience clearly defined?
• How detailed and informative is the copy?
• How effective are the CTAs?

Let’s understand all four aspects with some practical examples:

 

Under this question, let us look at real-life examples. If we type the search term ‘Digital marketing company’, as it’s a fairly commercial and interesting term, people want to spend money because you’ve got a few different audiences who will be searching for this. 

As per the above picture, we can see that there are quite different-looking sites we have opened in different tabs. Let us remember our questions one by one.

The first question is: does the site look modern and appealing? 

So we are starting with Falcan and BrainPulse Technologies. While the Falcan looks sleek when it comes to design, the BrainPulse Technologies looks very simple, and their design is more of the times of the early 2000.

The second question is: if the target audience clearly defined?

Here BrainPulse Technologies have an upper hand on Falcan. The Falcan is talking about the digital marketing agency itself, whereas BrainPulse Technologies is directly responding to consumer needs by addressing their desires.

The third question is: how detailed and informative is the copy?

If you look at BrainPulse Technologies copy, you get to see some good descriptions about what exactly they do. The Falcan copy looks very blunt, as it is not clearly defining who it is talking to. On the other hand, if we see the copy of BrainPulse Technologies, their copy clearly indicates that they are targeting business owners.

The fourth question is: effectiveness of their CTAs?

BrainPulse Technologies have four CTAs at the top of the fold. Also, all four CTAs are different from each other. They have taken care that some people prefer written communication and some like to hop on a call. So, they gave a CTA for sending them an email, one CTA for calling them.

They didn’t stop there only. BrainPulse Technologies completely understand human behaviour and know that some people hesitate to start a conversation on their own. So, they added an enquiry form and an option to leave your number. If you choose any of these options, they will call you.

On the other hand, Falcan has only one CTA, “Contact Falkan” which seems very blank.

SEO Analysis

An SEO competitor analysis, also known as an SEO competitive analysis, entails looking at the content and other aspects of the content, such as the links and keywords utilised by a rival. Simply put, it’s an SEO comparison of two rival websites in the same industry or business.

Analyze your competitors The following are some examples of SEO:

• Analysis of SEO keyword competitiveness
• Analysis of competitor backlinks
• Keyword gap analysis
• Analysis of top content

Because you don’t have to start your investigation from scratch, SEO competition analysis is effective and efficient. You may learn from your competitors’ SEO strategies and adapt them to your own.

Most marketers utilise an SEO competitor analysis tool to expedite the process and acquire large amounts of data with minimal effort. These tools can also be used to create SEO reports based on competitor information. Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz are some examples of SEO competitor analysis tools.

Marketers are taught how to conduct competitive research. To maintain their ranks and be competitive in their field, businesses use SEO.

Under SEO analysis, we’re going to look at analyzing your competitors’ SEO situations. Now, let’s first head over to this tool called ‘Ubersuggest’. Ubersuggest is usually our weapon of choice when it comes to analyzing competitors’ SEO. So what we’ve done is, we’ve used the same sites as we were looking at previously. We’ve got the first five sites that are ranking on Google. The first of the top-ranking sites for this time at the moment is the same BrainPulse Technologies. 

This single tool helps you in the analysis of SEO keyword competitiveness, analysis of competitor backlinks, keyword gap analysis, analysis of top-performing content, and how many people actually visit your competitor’s website.

Keyword gap analysis

Pay close attention to the keywords for which you already rank but where you are lagging behind your competitors, especially if you are only a position or two behind your main competition for a certain keyword phrase.

What is Keyword Gap Analysis?

The practice of determining keywords that a site’s competitors rank well for is known as keyword gap analysis. This may seem self-evident, but competitors are likely to score higher for dozens of smaller, specialised keywords. The combined traffic from all of these low-search-high-intent phrases could give the rival the upper hand.

Consider a website that sells athletic shoes. There are obvious terms that all rivals would target, such as shoe brands and models, but what about niches? Extra-large shoe sizes for the well-endowed in podiatry? Specific shoe styles, such as athletic spikes? Or a cleat for golf or cricket? These words may not even be on your radar as you strive to amass massive amounts of traffic by targeting the biggest, baddest phrases; nevertheless, by their very nature, they have high intent and are likely to convert, as well as being relatively low in competition.

 

Analysis of Top-performing Content

Just as you need to know the keywords your competitors are ranking for, you also need to know which pages they are most popular with.

Take note of the following:

• Which pages have the highest keyword rankings?
• What are the most popular pages?
• Which pages receive the most traffic as a percentage of total traffic?

Competitors can sometimes have a lot of traffic to a specific website or set of pages. For example, the third most popular page on Home Depot is a wallpaper page, not a page on building supplies or construction.

 

Analysis of competitor backlinks

Backlink analysis is a crucial component of competitive analysis. When a rival has a considerably superior backlink profile, particularly high-quality backlinks from credible websites, it will be more difficult for you to compete against them until you can build up a backlink profile that is comparable.

It’s also crucial to understand the difference between high-quality and low-quality backlinks.

Because of the changes Google made with the Penguin update to how they manage low-quality links, if you see a rival has a lot of low-quality links, those connections may not be helping them at all.

If you follow their lead and prioritise number over quality when it comes to links, you may end up hurting your own SEO. Because you can’t see what your competitor’s disavowal file looks like, be mindful of copying spammy links directly from them.

High-Quality Backlinks

High-quality backlinks, such as those from prominent news sites, high-profile sites, or specialists in your market areas, are what you want to focus on. Consider the following questions when examining your competitors’ backlinks:

• Have they been featured in major news outlets? Is there any way you can get yourself into such stories if that’s the case?
• Is there a high-profile but noncommercial site in your field that recommends them?
• What steps can you take to ensure that you are included in those recommended resources?

Both Nofollow and Followed Backlinks Can Be Beneficial

You should also look for nofollow vs. followed links. Because nofollow links aren’t used by Google’s algorithms, they won’t necessarily aid with SEO.

They can, however, be a valuable source of traffic that helps to raise brand awareness, improve traffic, and increase conversions. As a result, don’t disregard high-quality links just because they’re nofollowed. Even if the SEO benefit isn’t there, all of those links can have a lot of non-SEO worth.

Backlink Gaps

Look for significant gaps in your backlinks, especially connections from the same page or site that numerous competitors have. It’s usually simple to get oneself listed if they’ve linked to a lot of your competitors.

Don’t forget to look for backlinks to your competitors’ strong internal pages. When it comes to competitive analysis, many people only evaluate connections to the homepage, but links to internal pages might be just as essential. Incoming links to some of their best-performing internal pages could be a big influence on those pages’ high rankings.

PPC Analysis

You may better grasp what happens in the ever-changing search marketing landscape by looking at how other advertisers integrate SEO and PPC techniques. There’s never a dull moment when it comes to organic and paid search. Should you bid on a keyword if you already rank number one organically for that term? Should this keyword be removed from your PPC campaign?

Comparing the organic and paid search efforts of your competitors will give you a decent indication of the strategies other advertisers in your niche employ. You can use the Keyword Gap tool to analyse your competitors’ organic and paid keywords to discover if they are paying to promote phrases for which they already rank well in the organic results.

Identifying which keywords your competitors are targeting and what they’re doing to rank for them will aid in the development of your PPC campaign. This data will be your ace in the hole: it will point you in the right way when it comes to ad spending.

Social Media Analysis

To stay one step ahead of the pack and win on social media? Begin by conducting a social media competitive analysis.

It will show you how you compare to others in your field and identify new opportunities and risks.

What is social media competitive analysis?

A competitive analysis is an examination of your competition to determine their strengths and weaknesses, as well as how they compare to your own.

It’s a method of comparing your own outcomes to those of industry heavyweights so you can spot areas for improvement and techniques that aren’t doing as well as they should.

A competitive examination of social media, in particular, will assist you in:

• Determine who your social media competitors are.
• Learn which social media sites they use and how they use them.
• Determine how effective their social media strategy is.
• Compare your social media performance to those of your competitors.
• Recognize the societal threats to your company.
• Look for flaws in your own social media marketing plan.

Why do competitor analysis on social media?

Competitor analysis on social media isn’t just about learning about your competitors. It will also provide you with information about your own company and your target audience (which will most likely coincide with that of your competitors).

Here are some unexpected findings from a social media competitive analysis:

• Benchmarks for your own company’s performance, such as average followers, engagement rates, and voice share.
• Ideas for when to publish on social media at the optimal times (since your audience is likely online at a similar time.)
• An understanding of the customer’s potential pain points.
• New (and better) content ideas that might appeal to your target audience (or that, conversely, does NOT resonate with your audience, and which you might want to avoid.)
• Working knowledge of how to communicate with your audience on various platforms (i.e., casually or formally.)
• Suggestions for differentiating your brand.

And there’s more!
Finally, you will get out of a social media competitive analysis of what you put into it. You can either produce a one-time social media competitor report or hire someone to keep track of your competition as part of your team. The majority of companies do something in the middle: a quarterly or monthly report.

The insights gained from any level of study will be priceless.

Uncover Your Competitors Social Media Game

You need to study what your competitors are doing on social media now that you know who they are.

Go to each of the brands you’ve identified as key competitors’ social media pages. As previously said, these links are usually found in the header or bottom of their website. Make a note of the following in your social media competition analysis template:

• What social media platforms do they use?
• How big is their fan base, and how quickly is it growing?
• Who are their most ardent supporters?
• How frequently do they update their status?
• What is their rate of engagement?
• What is their social voice share?
• What are the most popular hashtags they use?
• What’s the total number of hashtags they use?

Much of this information may be found by just browsing your competitors’ social profiles. Check out the tools listed below for more efficient data collection.

Remember to keep track of all of these things for your own social media accounts.

You don’t need to do all the above manually. As we use Ubersuggest or SEMrush, you can use social media analytics tools in the same way to do social media competitive analysis. Some of the best social media analytics tools are Hootsuite, BuzzSumo, Brandwatch etc.

Takeaway:

• Completing a competitive analysis is only the first step in your strategic planning process. Don’t allow all of your efforts to go to waste. Make strategic decisions based on the information you’ve gathered.
• Don’t know where to begin? Conducting a SWOT analysis, in which you analyze your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats might be beneficial. This can assist you in sorting the data you have gathered throughout your competitor analysis study and determining actionable next steps for your company.
• You may always look back to your study whenever you need to make an important decision for your organization. You should evaluate and update your competitor analysis frequently to keep ahead of the competition.
• It’s critical to keep your competitors in mind, whether your firm is large or tiny, well-established or just getting started. Conduct a competitor analysis right now to ensure your business’s success.

Competition analysis gives you a competitive edge over your competition in the digital world. However, competition analysis is not the only thing that will help you to succeed in the online business. There are 18 digital channels that you must leverage in order to establish a profitable online venture.

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