How to Analyse your Competition and Elevate Your Online Marketing Efforts

What is competitor analysis? Why is it important? How do you conduct this research successfully? Here is all you need to know about competitor analysis and how you can do it in the following 6 steps.

What Is Competitor Analysis?

Competitor analysis refers to the process of researching and analysing other companies within your industry and the marketing strategies they implement on a daily basis.

The competitor research provides you with valuable insight into what other brands in your niche industry are doing to help their business grow. This type of analysis evaluates a variety of factors to help you detect what drives traffic to your competitors’ websites.

A Wholesome Approach to Researching Your Competitors

There are four main areas of performance you should aim to evaluate when it comes to conducting competitor analysis:

• Social Media Marketing
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Content Marketing

A 6-Step Competitor Research

When analysing your competitors marketing strategies, there are 6 crucial steps you should cover. Everything your competitors utilize as their digital marketing strategy online, from paid channels to organic SEO performance, can easily be tracked and analysed. Here’s how you can do that.

Step #1: Identify Competitors

The first step includes identifying your competition. There are two groups of competitors you should pay attention to direct and indirect competitors. These are all the brands that offer very similar services or products to the same target audience. However, don’t neglect the competitors who offer different products and services but they target the same problem your company offers solutions for.

A lot of brands tend to misunderstand who their main competition is. Most of the time they cover some of the most obvious and major competitors, but then forget to analyse the less obvious options.

Try to narrow down your options at first though. For instance, you can focus your attention on 3 to 5 competitors and analyse their digital marketing strategies on all of the platforms and channels they use. You can also choose to research your top competitors per every channel you use.

Step #2: Investigate Competitors’ Social Media Ads Strategy

Before you start working on your brand’s social media marketing, you should explore other companies’ social media strategies. You can check their Facebook and LinkedIn pages as well as their Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok accounts.

You even have free access to Facebook’s tool that will help you get an insight into your competition’s ‘backstage’. Many companies rely on LinkedIn and Facebook lead ads to lead their visitors towards their custom-tailored landing web pages. So, try to see what kind of visuals, offers, and messaging your competition has found to work well.

Step #3: Benchmark Competitors’ Google Ads

The next thing you should do is track your competition’s PPC efforts. Here’s how you can do that and what tools will be of great use.

The good news is you don’t have to use paid ads to access Google’s Keyword Planner. However, you do have to create an ads account. Only that way can you access free tools. With the Keyword Planner, you’ll be able to see the volumes and average cost per click of the keywords your competitors are utilising within the specific selected region. This way, you will be able to discover new phrases related to your brand, plan your ads, and see how often online users search specific words.

There are a few great tools that you can use for this stage of competition analysis. For instance, Ahrefs can help you scan keywords your competition is bidding on as well as their highest-performing landing web pages. Keyword research is extremely important for analysing your competition since it gives you insight into what phrases are performing well on Google. You can also use Semrush which allows you to have access to all of the most crucial tools.

You need to keep in mind that the market can get very competitive. As a result, it can drive high CPCs for your brand’s Google ads. If you spot these kinds of trends repeating themselves in your campaigns, it usually means that there’s a high chance you’re in a race to 0. To counter this risk, the best thing you can do is to invest in your company with content marketing and SEO. This way, you will be able to check your organic competition.

Step #4: SEO Tools to Track Competitors’ Organic Performance

In order to properly track your competition’s organic traffic, SEO experts recommend identifying some of the highest-performing keywords and webpages, running crawlers, keeping up with current SEO trends, setting up visibility reports, and tracking the E-A-T signals manually.

Web crawlers or spiders can easily go over your business website and other competing domains and collect relevant data. You can detect a wide range of different technical issues that may be affecting your page visibility on Google. On top of that, you can unravel thin or duplicate content and the status of all of the links.

You should also know how to assess competitors’ organic growth by narrowing down the keywords the competition’s website uses and high-traffic pages. This will provide you with valuable insight into how users interact with such content.

However, no SEO toolkit is ever fully complete without an efficient solution for difficulty score analysis and keyword volume. Creating an effective SEO strategy involves several different but equal factors. For instance, in addition to this, you should also ensure that your page has a great and quick load time, is optimized for mobile phones, and doesn’t have any errors. You can learn a great deal about how to do this from your competition.

You can observe how their website performs, what it looks like on mobile phones, how they arranged their website navigation and so much more. A user-friendly website is sometimes all it takes for online customers to stick around. If your load time is amazing and people understand how to get around your site to find what they want, that is already half of the job done.

If SEO practices are something you’re still getting familiar with, there are tons of professionals in Australia you can turn to for help. With reliable SEO services in Sydney, you can rest assured knowing you have experts on your team who can successfully do keyword research for you, help you examine your competition’s SEO efforts, and create efficient SEO strategies and approaches for your company.

Step #5: Evaluate Competitors’ Content Marketing

Most of the work you have to do surrounding competition analysis is manual.  For instance, this step requires you to spend some time evaluating competitive web pages within your niche industry. Observe what kind of formats and content they use and what exactly makes them stand out. These are just some of the things you should carefully review:

• The main navigation pages content
• The way the pages on the website interlink
• How your competitors are showcasing the benefits and features of their services and/or products
• What content formats do they use for their marketing
• Gated and non-gated content resources
• Main topic hubs

If you want to actually satisfy and meet your target audience’s needs, expectations, and intent, you need to put out highly valuable, relevant and high-quality webpage content.

You might be wondering where exactly you should start. This task will become much easier once you map your clients’ searches with the bottom, middle, and top if the funnel content. When examining the competitors’ sites see if they have well-developed pages supporting their customers’ journey in all three of these stages. Also, pay attention to how they communicate their selling proposition and separate their competitive advantage from the rest.

Most companies use behavioural tactics for the purpose of nurturing their prospects. This mostly helps trigger a purchase decision. The ‘messy middle’ is how Google likes to refer to this process between consideration and purchase.

What helps most businesses cross this ‘messy middle’ is the use of ‘the power of now. This means that they have instant access, same-day shipping, 24/7 services, and other favourable features that encourage customers to make a purchase.

Step #6: Map out Challenges and Opportunities with a SWOT Analysis

Lastly, without an old but reliable SWOT analysis, your competition research is not yet over. The great thing about SWOT analysis is that it doesn’t need to cover every detail. All you need to do is mark the strengths and weaknesses of your competition. Then examine the opportunities and threats in a framework and this will show you the path you need to take to help your business grow.

Going through the previous 5 stages will help you detect some of the similar trends in your competition’s organic and paid marketing. You will be able to tell which practices have brought them advantages and in what sectors you can outperform them with some simple investment of resources.

Conclusion

Overall, analysing your competition in your niche industry is crucial because it helps you get a better understanding of what you need to do to help your business grow. You’ll notice certain patterns in other brands’ strategies and approaches that will give you a general idea of what you need to change and improve in your own company. By following these 6 steps you’ll be able to successfully analyse your competition and efficiently implement what you’ve learned.