Even with a brilliant idea, an impressive product, and excellent customer service, there is a harsh reality. Likely, other companies are offering similar products or services. Those companies would be in direct competition with you.
A fundamental business tactic is to stay ahead of competitors, gain an advantage, and increase market share by attracting more customers through strategic moves. Knowing what your competitors offer is not enough; there is much more to consider.
In today’s world of digital marketing, it is essential to conduct competitor analysis as it is a fundamental step. If you’re new to competitor analysis, this post is perfect for beginners, as we’ll start with the basics and dive into the options available.
What is Competitor Analysis?
Competitor analysis involves several steps that can help you gain insight into your competitors’ actions and successful online marketing strategies. By reverse-engineering these strategies, you can potentially surpass your competitors.
Many software options available online allow small businesses and freelancers to conduct competitive analyses. In this blog post, we’ll briefly overview some of these tools to help you start this process.
The Importance of Competitor Analysis
Once you have completed your online marketing plan, you can use two approaches:
Many suggestions, recommendations, and approaches for search engine optimization and digital marketing are available on the internet. You can experiment with these strategies to see which ones work for your business, but it can feel like a trial-and-error process.
This is not the most efficient approach, as you might expect.
This is especially true when companies rely on paid advertising methods and cannot justify spending large amounts of money each month to determine which traffic and lead generation strategies will be effective for their specific industry and business.
Alternatively, analyzing your primary competitors and learning from their successful strategies is a more practical approach. Because they operate in the same industry as you, their successful tactics may also benefit your business.
In this case, competitor analysis becomes essential.
By identifying your competitors’ successful strategies, you can replicate them and improve and grow your business without wasting valuable time and money on vague strategies.
Many tools are available to analyze competitors regarding search engine optimization and digital marketing strategies. The Innovative SEO Platform presents tools for analyzing competitors and gives practical advice.
How to Start Competitor Analysis?
Now that you understand the concept of competitor analysis and know where to find the tools let’s look at how you can begin the process.
Start by identifying the five to ten biggest competitors in your industry. If you’re having trouble placing your competitors, do a Google search using your products and services.
Learn SEO strategies and website setups of your competitors. Check if they have a blog section, the number of backlinks, and how they create page titles, meta descriptions, and URL structures. Also, analyze their internal linking strategies.
Find the specific keywords they are focusing on. By identifying your most important keywords, you can understand how they attract the most visitors to your site. Check your competitors’ PPC advertising.
Once you’ve identified your target keywords, study their associated content pages and take notes on any points of interest. Are there a lot of images, videos, and infographics in your blog posts?
What content is published, such as webinars, FAQs, case studies, buyer guides, press releases, or white papers? To improve your understanding of marketing and content creation, learn how competitor analysis can help improve your site’s content.
Study your competitors’ social media pages to determine which ones receive the most attention and interaction. After studying 3-5 competitors, you will notice a pattern where some platforms are more successful. This analysis will help determine where to focus your social media marketing efforts.
Conclusion
Competitor analysis is a crucial element of online business, and this article aims to give newcomers a clear understanding of its importance and starting point.
