How to Do a Competitor Analysis? What You Need to Know About Competitor Analysis

What is Competitor Analysis?

In today’s age of technological advancement, where the world of online marketing is constantly growing and changing, it is becoming more important than ever, to use every resource you have to gain momentum and surpass the strategies of your competitors! Whether you have identified a specific brand or business or are simply scouring for potential competitors, ensuring that you have a leg up on the competition is necessary for success within the competitive world of digital marketing. 

One of the best ways to find out exactly what the competition is doing, finding their strengths, weaknesses and everything in between, is to do a competitor analysis. This marketing strategy works by providing a basic rundown of what your competition is doing and whether or not it is helping them to succeed. When looking at doing a competitor analysis, it is important to remember that you are not just looking at the things that a brand is doing right, but also what it is doing wrong. Through finding issues within their marketing strategy, things that are not working, you can be sure to avoid making the same mistakes that they have. 

Through compiling a competitor analysis and working this strategy into your marketing plan, you can find new ways to improve your own content by using what is successful. There are many different SEO competitor analysis tools that perform this rundown, supplying you with all the data you need to help you find the strengths and weaknesses of a brand or businesses online marketing strategy. The importance of competitor analysis should never be underestimated, and the data that is retrieved by completing this tactic can help you to structure and define your own marketing strategies. 

What is The Purpose of Doing Competitor Analysis?

When thinking about what competitor analysis in marketing is, it is important to understand its purpose and why it is becoming such an important element of any good marketing strategy. Competitive analysis in marketing helps you to identify gaps within your own content and strategy, helping you to determine where and how you can improve your own marketing tactics, helping you to keep your own clients and gain some new ones. When it comes to SEO and marketing, ensuring that you have the best and most reliable website and the content will go a long way to ensure that you are above the competition, both in regards to your search engine results page ranking and with your cli9ent base. You should have all of the best aspects that your competitors do, along with your own individual and unique flair that sets you apart from the rest, ensuring that you are offering the best data for the customers who make their way to your website. Whether you have a blog or are running an e-commerce website, having done a competitor analysis will ensure that you are above the competition in all of the most important ways! 

What is The Importance of Competitor Analysis for Your Business?

Competitor research and analysis is important for any brand or business, especially if you are looking at branching out and improving your online presence. Many people assume that competitor analysis came about when online businesses started taking off, but this is something that has been around for a very long time! In order to determine what you need to succeed and surpass your competition, you need to have a very good idea of what they do, how they do it and what parts of their process have been perfected and what could perhaps need a bit of work. With a good competitor analysis, you can find things about your target market that you may have never known before, and things like the best platforms to market on, the best content that draws their attention and even keywords can all be discovered through compiling competitor analysis research. The importance of completing this kind of research should never be underestimated and a thorough review of your nearest competition should be done regularly. 

When Should You Do a Competitor Analysis?

As the market is extremely fluid, changing and adapting over time, the way that you market yourself and the strategies and tactics that you use also need to be regularly reviewed. Along with this, competitor analysis is something that should take place regularly to ensure that the updates that a brand is making are not surpassing your own. So why do you have to regularly perform checks on your competition and how does it help improve your marketing strategy? Through doing regular analysis of your competition, you can be sure to find the improvements, whether they are advantageous or have a negative impact, and use this information to better your own strategy. You could perhaps be leaning towards trying something new within your marketing campaign and find that your competition has tried a similar thing and failed. Using this information to adapt your own strategy will ensure that you are aware of all potential issues that arise when compiling and creating certain content. Doing this kind of research regularly will ensure that you have all the tools and information to succeed and surpass your competition! 

What are The Benefits Of Competitor Analysis?

There are many advantages of competitor analysis, and compiling this kind of research can help with many aspects of your marketing plan. One of the benefits includes seeing how products do when on the market and finding the best ways to market these new items. Many brands and businesses that function as e-commerce websites do not know how customers will react to certain products or services, and if your competition has tried something similar to what you were planning, using competitor analysis is a way to see whether or not your product will be popular. You can also look to see how effective their marketing strategy was and make tweaks where you think they were maybe lacking. 

Along with helping you to see whether a new product or server is popular with customers, competitor analysis also helps you to note the gaps in a marketing strategy. Through using competitor analysis tools, you gain insight into the analytical issues that are noted on a  website and can gain insight into ways that you could adapt your own market research. Using these analytical tools is a great way to determine how you can better your competitors’ plans and fill in the gaps of their strategy. 

What Happens If You Don’t Do Competitor Analysis?

For those who are thinking of leaving out competitor analysis within your marketing plan, it is important that you understand the risks involved in doing so. Many underestimate competitor research by saying that there are no other brands or businesses doing what they do, and while this may be true it does not mean that you should ignore this step in the process. One of the first things to note if you have a customer saying that they have no competition is that there is quite possibly a reason for this. Doing competitor research involves more than just analysing what has succeeded, but also looking at competition and asking why they failed. competitor analysis should also look at businesses within the sector that have not succeeded and understand why. 

Another popular reason that many use to try and get markets to skip the competitor analysis stage of the process is because they assume that competitor analysis stands for copying. Any marketer who is copying an entire marketing plan from another company, may not be the best marketer around and there need to be tweaks and adjustments made to ensure that you are designing a unique plan. Competitor analysis is designed to map out who your competition is and the products or services they provide, while looking at how each of these different products is marketed to consumers. Using the details within this strategy and determining whether or not the marketing plan that a brand or business is using is effective is simply analysing what they have done right and what they have done wrong, and then using this information to better your own plan. 

 

What Platforms Can Competitor Analysis Be Done On?

Seo Competitor Analysis

When thinking of how to do a competitor analysis for SEO, it is important to think about the bases that you should be covering. When it comes to SEO, determining your competition based on rankings ensures that you have an idea of what your competition is doing to improve their rankings. things like page load speed, keywords and any other SEO factor would fall within this category. Like with any other competitor analysis, looking at the different SEO elements involves gaining insight, both positive and negative, into the tactics and strategies that a brand is using to improve how visible their website is on search engines. 

Website Competitor Analysis

A website competitor analysis involves looking at the different website tools that a brand or business is using and the type of features that they have included within their webpage. There are quite a few crossovers when it comes to SEO and website competitor analysis because many SEO issues come from problems within a website’s features.

Social Media Competitor Analysis

A social media competitor analysis involves scoping out the competitors’ social media pages and platforms. This type of analysis involves looking at the different platforms that they use, the content that they post and the different features that they take advantage of on specific platforms. An example could be when looking at Instagram, does a brand or business use stories oir focus more on posts? What content do they post about? What kinds of images do they use? How many followers do they have? Asking these kinds of questions and gathering this information will ensure that you have a good idea of what your competition is doing on social media. 

Email Marketing Competitor Analysis

An email marketing competitor analysis involves gathering information and data with regard to your competitors’ email marketing. It is extremely easy to sign up for your competitors’ emails, and creating an account that is dedicated to receiving all of the marketing emails that your competitors send out will ensure you have a good idea of their tactics. 

How to Do a Competitor Analysis?

There are many ways of how to do competitor analysis, and the following are just a few steps that any marketer should take to ensure that the analysis that they are creating and covering all of the necessary bases. 

Determine Your Top Competitors

One of the most obvious places to start when doing competitor analysis research is by looking at who your top competitors are. You get two kinds of competitors that should be analysed, both direct and indirect. Direct competitors are those brands and businesses that operate within your area and offer a similar commodity or service to your own. An indirect competitor offers a product or service that is not similar to your own, but it could easily substitute for it if need be. When completing a competitor analysis it is usually best to stay focused on determining who your direct competitors are, as this will provide the best feedback and information on how to go about structuring your own marketing campaign. While having an idea of who your indirect competitors are, not having similar products to your own could waste a lot of time and money as a lot of the information and data accumulated through a competitor analysis would not be useful to use. 

Perform a Swot Analysis

Identifying the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to your competition is an important part of the competitor analysis process. Performing this kind of analysis helps brands and businesses to better understand their competition, and in turn, may help them to better understand their own. Through compiling this kind of research, you can determine all the important things about a brand or business and determine whether or not their marketing strategies include anything that is of value to you. 

Compare Site Traffic And Performance

Through the use of competitor analysis tools, it is possible to monitor the site traffic and performance of a competitor website. Though this may sound a bit like spying on the competition, it is a very common practice that is geared towards brands and businesses finding the best ways to market their product. If a brand is using a similar marketing tactic to you and they have numbers and performance metrics that are rising, this is a good indication that the similar actions that you take would more than likely have a similar result! It is important to measure site traffic and performance as it can equip you with the data you need to make decisions about your own strategies and tactics.  

Profile Your Competition’s Target Customers

if a brand or business is your direct competitor it means that their target audience will also be yours. One of the main features that competitor analysis can actually save you time and money, is that if done properly, you can determine who your target audience is without having to go through the normal and often long, processes of finding this information. By profiling your competitors target customers, you are ultimately finding out who your target audience is and how best to market to them. Ensuring that you include profiling your competitors’ target market is a great way that competitor analysis can help you to create a good marketing strategy. 

Focus On The 4 P’s

The 4 P’s refer to the four elements that you should pay close attention to when completing a competitor analysis. These four P’s are product, price, promotion, and place, and they help you to determine your competitor’s marketing strategy. When thinking about each of these elements, it is important to relate them back to your own brand and find the information that is most relevant to your own. This will ensure that your competitor analysis produces only relevant information as opposed to information that may not be of use to you. For example, if you are looking into the products that a t-shirt and hat company produces, but you only sell hats, you would not do any research into the t-shirt products available as this would not help you. 

What are The Effects of Competitor Analysis on Your SEO Strategy?

Completing a competitor analysis frequently will help to improve your website’s SEO and help you to position yourself better on search engine results pages. Much of the information that is compiled through a competitor analysis has to do with aspects that impact your SEO, and so it is often suggested by SEO and copywriting companies that you do a competitor analysis, particularly if you have competitors that are ranking highly. Through observing and tweaking their own marketing strategies and tactics, you can help to improve on your own SEO! 

What are The Best Tools for Doing Competitor Analysis?

SEMRush

The SEMRush competitor analysis tool is a great tool that has many features to help you to monitor your competition’s strategy, determine the strengths and weaknesses of their marketing tactics and allow you to use this important information to your own advantage. This specific competitor analysis tool is considered to be one of the top competitor ones around and being able to use it ensures that you are making informed decisions around your own marketing techniques. When it comes to backlinks and keywords, this analysis tool is capable of it all and can ens8ure that you are easily able to find and use keywords that are working while avoiding ones that do not, the same goes with various backlinks and their effectiveness! SEMRush works by making sure that you are doing what your competition is getting right and avoiding the mistakes they are making or have made within their previous strategies.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a suite of tools that provides numerous different competitor analysis features, ensuring that you are equipped with all that you need to compile data about your competition, from keyword analysis to finding information on your competitors top pages. Another feature that helps you to better understand your competition is their content analysis tool. This tool provides information on how effective the content that your competition is using, helping you to find ways that you can surpass the type of content that they are using! 

Buzzsumo

When it comes to measuring the metrics of each of your competitors, there is no better tool to use than Buzzsumo. This effective and efficient tool works to find and analyse the metric data produced by a website and having this information can help you to determine whether or not the brand or business is producing effective content. Having Buzzsumo helps you to monitor the metrics produced will ensure that you are aware of changes and how these changes have impacted the reliability and visibility of the webpage. 

Google AdWords Keyword Planner

When it comes to finding content for Google Ads and other marketing content on your webpage, there is no better tool than Google Adwords Keyword Planner. This tool helps you to map out the best keywords to use with regards to the content that you are writing about, providing information on things like trends and other keyword aspects that may influence your content and the amount of traffic that it receives. 

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a great platform to use if you are looking at improving your marketing strategy by doing a competitor analysis. This easy to use tool has a platform whereby numerous different businesses can be scoured and information with regards to content, keywords and backlinks are presented. This information can be used to tweak your own data, using what has been successful and adapting what has not. 

How Can Markethinkers Help You About Competitor Analysis?

Our professional SEO consulting and SEO copywriting team of experts here at Markethinkers are able to take care of and help with all SEO and marketing elements, including help with competitor analysis. As competitor analysis should be done when creating or redesigning any brand’s image or marketing techniques, it is important that you get the best team behind you to implement and execute this kind of analysis. Here at Markethinkers, we aim to create content and techniques that are based on a lot of research and also include each company’s unique flare! When it comes to competitor analysis, it is important that we give you the information and the tools that can help you take the things that your competitors are doing right and try and implement them, but also that we note what they are doing wrong and ensure that you do not make the same mistakes. As a marketing and SEO business, we have what you need to create a unique and brilliant marketing plan, that will help you to achieve your goals!