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Posted on: Dec 05, 2019 15 min read
Competitor analysis needs to be done on a daily basis and not once a year. It is extremely important to add competitive analysis in your effective marketing plan in order to demonstrate to your investors that you are very much aware of the competition. You should have a clear picture of the marketplace with suitable plans that will help you to compete on a similar or better level than your competition.
Some of the biggest challenges you will face with your competitors are the following:
It is all about recognising and assessing your competitors’ strengths as well as weaknesses. The information will help you to improve all efforts of your company and get the maximum benefit from it.
The competitive analysis will include the following:
A competitor analysis will:
According to DubSEO experts, competitor analysis is about conducting thorough market research to search for suitable opportunities and potential risks associated with different strategies like launching a brand new product.
After you identify your competitors, you will be able to geta better understanding of what kind of content they are publishing, what type of content they are mainly focusing on and what is working for them. Then, you should be asking yourself if you are currently doing any of the listed below:
Competitor analysis is important if:
So, where are your competitors using the most appropriate keywords?
If new keywords have higher search volume, you should search for keywords with lower search volume or long-tail keywords.
A keyword like bookshas great competition and is difficult to rank for in the search engines. This generic keyword will not tell anything about what the consumer is searching for such as – fiction, biography and fact.
If your competitors are using trending topics in their marketing strategies, then you are missing an opportunity to outrank them in search engine results pages.
Let’s have a look at keyword analytics that have resulted in organic traffic. You should be collecting this information when analysing topics and keywords.
Experts working in a reputed SEO agency have said that your brand will compete with others in the local, national, or international market. After you establish the competition, it is important to begin with your competitive intelligence or research of analyzing and collecting data about your competitors.
You need to go through company profiles, annual reports, product brochures and press releases. Social media listening brings more valuable and deeper digital consumer insights. By using the right tools, you know how consumers feel about the products and services of their competitors. You can also identify the latesttrends and discover newer brands coming in the market.
Compare your strengths and weaknesses with your competitors in areas such as:
Friendly and good customer service
Noisy atmosphere with fast food outlets
Quality and expensive food with cold customer service
Cheap and deliver to your door
Compare your brand with that of the competitors
An important question is, “How much do people talk about your brand as compared to that of your competition?” A strong SOV is not at all a good thing if a greater percentage was caused due to crisis. But, these insights will provide a better picture of your brand awareness when compared with this industry.
Yourfeelings about your brand will be expressed in the comments section which is between you and your competitors. It is extremely important to track sentiment and know how your marketing campaigns can have a great impact on consumer perception of your brand when compared to that of yourcompetitors.
Consider key topics of the conversations to know what consumers say about your products, services or brand. By knowing theexact phrases that consumers use, you can get better understanding of where your brand will fit properly. It will also give newopportunities to position your brand in and join meaningful conversations that were previously unheard.
It is important to know the customers of competitors' and if they are similar to your customers. Try to refocus and target to increase your customer base. Find the locations you fail to target with your marketing strategies and where your competitors are really doing well.
Make sure you know what your audience is interestedin so that you can keep them engaged. Social media analytics can show the interests of your audience and those of your competitors. This provides you with an insightof how to appeal to your competitors’ fans.
It is crucial to do SWOT analysis of your brand and include it in your marketing strategy. SWOT is about strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that help to identify internal and external factors that could begin toaffect the future performance of a team. Internal factors are said to be strengths and weaknesses while external factors are the opportunities and threats.
When you look at the SWOT of your competitors from a customer’s point of view, you actually analyse their strengths and weaknesses. This will enable them to understand their business in a better way. What are their valuable assets? How could your business take advantage of them? Also, know their weaknesses and work out how your company would like to address them. Try to put yourself in a customer’s shoes and ask yourself these questions:
Whenconducting competitor analysis, SWOT results need to beconsidered. External factors should be assessed carefully to make it more effective. PEST analysis is the element of risk or crisis management that ensures a company is well-prepared for the changes in some external factors.
Will a change be taken as an opportunity for doing better or seen as a threat? How will they deal with the change? By getting answers to these questions, you will know how your competitors operate and become part of your marketing strategy.
Moz
SEO competitive analysis offers data about what tactics are working in the relevant sector. By knowing the strong and weak areas of your competitors, you can havebetter understanding of how hard it will be to outrank them. Backlink analysis reveals which websites will link to your competitors. Some Moz SEO tools include –Open Site Explorer, Keyword Explorer, MozBar, link building, MozRank,site audits and page optimisation insights.
Quick Search
You can get a quick overview of your brand online. Search engine provides a wide coverage of social networks, blogs, forums and news sites. You may compare between several competitors brands with 90% accuracy, audience demographics, engagement, mentions and more.
Day Digital
Day Digital provides different services with SEO strategies to improve your website ranking on search engines. You need to search for relevant information on on-page optimisation, PPC, link building and social media. Though there isn’t any guarantee with SEO, Day Digital works towards improving the rankings on search engine result pages (SERPs) and increasing traffic with the presence of social media.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler that can be used to crawl competitor sites for key onsite SEO elements. This will also include – page titles, meta descriptions, headings and canonicals. You will be given proper insights into their optimisation with potential keywords that can be targeted for your website.
Talkwalker Alerts
According to London based SEO Consultant, you need to setalerts for receiving mentions of your brand with that of your competitors from websites, blogs, Twitterand forums. You will be able to easily view the content your competitors tweet and what people say about them.
SEMrush
With the help of SEMrush, you need to search for relevant information about organic search results and AdWords campaigns of your competitors. You will get keywords used across different search engines to know how much traffic they have and which search terms can generate more traffic. Thus, the successful search terms can be used for your own marketing strategy.
Majestic
Majestic is the link intelligence database for the complete analysis of anchor text and external links used by the competitors. You need to evaluate backlinks and domain link counts to know what your competitors will do for tracking your overall performance.
You can customise the template for your business requirements.
You need to know your main competitors and fill in the template for each of them.
It is important to know what makes your company unique from that of your competitors.
You should be aware about your target market and find out who your competitors are.
Make sure you know the keywords your competitors use for ranking and backlink strategy in the SERPs.
Add your present or future marketing campaigns with that of your competitors.
It is necessary to rate your company’s products and services with the competitors. This will help to know the features you are missing for the competition.
Keep the pricing of your products and services more affordable than your competitors so that more people are interested in your products and services.
Know the channels your competitors use for the text, images or videos and the frequency at which they post.
You must have already done it for your brand and now, it is time to do for your competitors.
It is essential to perform PEST analysis for your competitors and compare them with your own.
The ongoing process of conducting competitor analysis should be done regularly. This will provide your company with the added benefit that it requires to beat the competition. Evaluate your progress by installing tracking such as – Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, SEMrush and Moz. Watch your competitors and the present market with Talkwalker Alerts and Quick Search to know what will work and what will not.
