Competitive Analysis – A Surefire Way to Succeed Online
You must focus on your content and find ways to improve your website. But it is also equally important that you focus on competitors’ websites and stay up-to-date with the strategies they’re using to stay ahead. This doesn’t mean that you should dedicate your life to only focusing on what the competitors are doing. Friendly spying won’t hurt and is necessary.
By looking at your competitor’s website, you can get an idea of what new content you can focus on, new things that you can try and ways to maximise your traffic. The most important thing is that it is free and safe. You can look at their strengths and try to recreate them with your imaginative ideas.
Analysing your competition is very important, and therefore, this article will show you how you can analyse your competition and help increase your organic traffic.
Identify who your competitors are
Without knowing who your competitor is, you cannot analyse what they have been up to. In most cases, you may have a vague idea about who your competitor is, but you must be sure about them by doing a simple search on a free tool such as “Similar Web”. You can enter the link of your competitor’s website, but remember that you only get ten searches in the free version.
You can also identify them by typing the keyword in Google and then looking at the top websites. These websites are your main competition. Once you’ve known your biggest competitors, again go to Similar Web and get a look at their monthly visitors, the way traffic reaches their website, ways of getting referrals, and other figures.
Once you’ve identified your competitors, what can you learn from them?
Before analysing your competitor’s website, it is important to know what you want to learn from your competitor. If you’re unaware of what you want, then you’ll be simply wasting your time visiting your competitor.
If you do not know what to search for on the competitor’s website, we can help you. You can look for ways the competitors are increasing traffic on their website, how can you set yourself apart from your competitor. Look out for various methods to improve your website’s ranking and ways to improve your social media marketing strategies.
What should you focus more on in competitive website analysis?
It is estimated that around 8% of all the searches searched in the Search engine are always phrased as a question. This will help you analyse if the competitor uses any specific set of web content, including a list of content having some question in their headings. This will help you know about the type of content the competitor is known for using.
1- Check their content and look at how relevant they are to their website
You might have observed that some websites get huge amounts of monthly traffic, even though they do not post good content. This is because they have mastered the art of attracting organic traffic to their website. You may observe that they might not have great content ideas, which you can utilise in your website to fill the content gap.
Look at all the content they have covered, how they present their content, and which articles got the most number of comments. What you’re looking for in the website are ways to add something to your website that is better than your competitor.
2- Look at how they are presenting their brand
The way you present your brand tells the customers a lot about your vision for the brand. Famous brands use specific colours and shapes to attract customers and give them a sense of comfort and loyalty. Look at their logo and their tagline.
Each brand has various types of personalities such as enlightened, chilled, luxurious and rational. The important thing to remember is to come up with innovative ideas and help you stand apart from your competitors.
3- Check their social media marketing
Since all the brands and businesses have a social media handle, the way they handle social media can give you a glimpse of your competitor’s success. Companies use many tools (free and paid) to track the success of social media marketing. Around 48% of the population is on social media, so there is no shortage of social media ads and ways to engage with their customers.
If you find that your main competitor is focusing their social media skills on a particular platform, you can take up another social media platform to promote your business. Check out the posts that are their best performing posts and how you can come up with unique ideas to recreate the same success. Use these points to come up with your social media marketing strategy.
4- If you’re running an e-commerce website, check your competitor’s prices
While analysing the competitor’s website, check for their pricing and services offered by them. Understand how they are pricing their services and types of coupons, discounts used by them. Keep up with their promotion campaigns and learn from them. Be sure to keep your pricing and the rates transparent to avoid any issues in the future.
If you find the prices to be on the higher side, you can develop innovative ways of selling the prices at discounted rates. You can also start selling your products during the seasons at a lesser price and give something in return, such as cashback and online store credits. You can also offer your customers some features and benefits that are not incorporated into your competitor’s website.
5- Find out the tools used by the competitors
If you’re looking for ways to understand how the competitor drives organic traffic to their website, you can use tools such as SEM Rush, Aherfs, etc. These tools can help you improve your rankings in the search engine and generate organic traffic. Google Alerts helps you know every time any of your competitors are mentioned online. The alerts will be directly sent to your inbox.
You won’t get any traffic if your target audience is not fed your brand details. For this, you can use tools such as Quantcast and Alexa. You can see how your competitors are engaging with their audience, and you will understand the importance of the target audience. The best free service that can help you know which tools your competitor uses is Built With. Since social media marketing strategies are very important, many websites use a Social Blade to know about the number of followers of your competitors on social media.
6- Understand from which countries your competitors get the most traffic
Once you know the countries with the most traffic on your competitor’s website, you will be allowed to understand your niche more clearly. You can target the audience from those counties and create content relevant to their needs.
If the competitor gets more traffic from the USA, UK, Canada, Spain and Mexico, then it gives you a clear idea that you can also have an option to translate the website into Spanish. To maximise the traffic from Spain and Mexico, you can also start a blog in their regional language by using tools such as Google Translate.
7- The keywords are the most important to keep an eye on them
The keywords are responsible for driving organic traffic to competitors’ websites. You can analyse which keyword is more frequently used by the competitor. You can use other keywords that have lesser volume.
You can also notice the most used top ten keywords used by the competitor and develop new keywords closely related to the competitor’s keyword. Do not use keywords with higher keyword difficulty. They will be difficult to rank, and you will need to have almost 100s of backlinks to rank in the top 10-20.
8- Become a customer of your competitor
The best way to learn about how your competitors treat their customers is by becoming their customers. Learn how they approach you and how well the needs were taken care of. If you feel that they could have added this service, make sure to add it to your website.
Once you become a customer, the possibilities are endless. You can subscribe to their newsletter, call their customer support team, complain about their service, and see how they react. The possibilities are endless, and improvise on the shortcomings of your competitors.
Final thoughts
You should not be scared; instead, be excited about analysing your competitor’s website. There is a reason they have succeeded in their field, and there is no harm in learning how they reached where they are.
