Competitor analysis is helpful for determining your business’s standing in the market. It helps in assessing the weaknesses and strengths of competing brands.
We’ve compiled our tools and processes in a few basic steps. This is to provide you with everything you need to know about digital marketing competitor analysis.
Table of Contents
What Is Competitor Analysis?
Competitor analysis entails researching and analyzing companies’ marketing tactics in a particular industry.
Competitor research helps you understand what other brands in the same niche are doing to attract and keep customers. Analyzing your competitors’ most successful marketing tactics can help you identify your strengths and weaknesses to strengthen your ad campaign.
What are the Outcomes of the Competitor Analysis?
You and your competitors compete for the same audience, and leads will likely check out similar sites before choosing you. Therefore, competitive analysis should point to areas where the competition is too fierce and growth opportunities.
Spend your time trying to create a unique, innovative product rather than worry about what your direct competitors are doing. That way, you can take advantage of a competitor’s mistakes and reap the rewards of a competitor’s success. You can achieve this by hiring an SEO Company.
Let’s look at the Checklist for Competitor Analysis
Evaluate their online presence
To prepare for competitive analysis:
- Start by developing a list of your competitors.
- Check their websites for information. Such as products or services they offered, unique selling propositions, and branding.
- Perform an internet search to find other public sources of information about the company.
- Identify the company’s presence on social media platforms and note any relevant information there.
Check for keywords that are showing up
Every industry has a set of trending keywords, and your competitors are likely to show up in those search results. By noting which words and phrases your competitors appear for, you can target the exact keywords with your business to be more visible.
Check out the social media ads strategy
To develop a social media marketing strategy for your business, evaluate your competitors’ resources. For example, check their LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube pages if they use them.
On Facebook, all active ad campaigns and keyword search is done through the Facebook Ad library. This tool, however, will not show you which brands in your industry were advertising on the platform in previous months.
Businesses often direct visitors to customized landing pages using Facebook or LinkedIn as a lead source. On these platforms, advertisers can choose from many options for customization and branding. Digging deeper into what works well with the competition will reveal which offers, visuals, and messaging are worth using.
Review the audience they are catering to
When considering a content or marketing campaign, you must consider how your audience will respond. Audience analysis is key to this process. Social media competitor tools can provide you with detailed demographics on the social networks you are targeting. Tracking your competitors’ audience is a great way to measure your campaign’s success.
Being aware of your competitor’s audiences will allow you to determine whether you target the right people. It can also help you identify your audiences’ tendencies and needs.
Compare the post-performance reviews
Some brands have become successful because of their social media presence. This means the content they publish fetches a lot of audience attention. Therefore, to understand the brand’s success, we have to evaluate the performance of our competitor’s posts.
When examining a page, take a look at the page’s social metrics. Including engagement rate, reach, a number of likes, comments and shares, and follower growth. This process can take a while because you must also analyze the phrasing of the page.
Competitor analysis is crucial to any business. For example, some companies are better at working with images, and some are better at short videos. So, it would help if you studied your competitors and how they use these platforms before deciding how to focus your efforts.
Understand their marketing strategy
Modern brands increasingly rely on unique marketing techniques to keep their audiences engaged. Compare the strategies used by your competitors and see if you can use any unique strategies for promoting your products or services. Usually, social media marketing plans use influencers.
If your competitors are working with influencers for marketing, you should do the same. That way, you will see which kinds of influencers your competitors use to reach their target audiences, and how the collaborators are assisting in the consumers’ acquisition of goods or services.
Selected competitors’ Google Ads
How can you track your competitor’s PPC efforts?
However, the Google Keyword Planner is available to all accounts, whether or not you run paid ads on the platform. It shows volumes and average cost-per-click for the keywords your competitors are running in the selected region. The Keyword Planner can help you uncover new keyword phrases related to your brand. It helps you to view how often a word or phrase is searched by the public, and make an ad campaign that’s better aligned with how people search.
Ahrefs allows you to see which keywords your competitors use to bring in organic and paid traffic. It also offers a high-level sense of their PPC budget, how well it’s working for them, etc. However, Ahrefs’ PPC investment data is not too reliable.
Professionals use a variety of tools to find out about their competitors. One tool is Semrush, which provides free information about your competitors in its Advertising Research tab. You can read through ad copies, see live ads, track the most profitable PPC keywords, and monitor ad spending in this tab.
SEO tools to track organic performance
SEO experts suggest that to track organic growth, you should run crawlers. Identify the top-performing pages and keywords, set up visibility reports, and watch for rising SEO trends. Also manually track the E-A-T signals.
Crawlers, and web spiders, can collect important data from your website and competing domains. For example, if you run a website and are concerned about how visible it is to search engines, such as Google. You can use free tools like Screaming Frog to detect a full range of technical issues. These include duplicate or thin page content and the status of all links to and from a page.
If you want to find out how your competitors perform organically, Ahrefs can help you narrow down their high-traffic pages and the keywords these pages target.
A search-engine-optimization (SEO) toolkit is only as good as its keyword volume and difficulty score analysis feature. So what else should you consider? Site speed, performance on mobile devices, and removing any page errors are crucial for any website. Google offers free tools to measure site speed and check a site’s mobile-friendly status.
Google rewards expert-authority-trust domains. For example, an About Us page, adding an author to your blog posts and developing your knowledge graph shows Google who the people behind your business are and make your domains more trustworthy.
Assess your competitors’ content marketing
When researching your competitors’ content marketing strategy, you will start by manually reviewing their web pages. You can see what type of content and formats they use and how you can stand out. Also, it is important to review:
- The site’s main navigation pages content
- How Interlinking of Website pages is done
- Imagine how your competitors present the benefits and features of their products or services.
- What marketing formats do they use
- Competitors topic hubs
Only highly relevant and valuable page content can meet your audience’s intent, expectations, and pain points.
SWOT analysis to map out the key opportunities
Competitive research demands a SWOT analysis. This will allow you to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats associated with the project. While this form of analysis does not need to be exhaustive, it should provide an overview of the project’s most important factors.
Once you’ve conducted your research, you should notice obvious trends in your competitor’s paid and organic marketing. You’ll be able to tell where they stand out and where you can outperform them with a reasonable investment of resources. So what can you achieve in the short run—and what will require a long-term strategy?
Conclusion
Competitor analysis is an essential part of every marketing campaign. Before launching a new product or service, gather data on the competition. Then, update your research quarterly to ensure you are up to date with your competitor’s marketing tactics. The more experienced you get, the better your findings will be.
For more detailed information, contact Ahbiv Digital Agency; we will guide you through the right checklists needed for SEO competitor analysis.
