The importance of a competitor analysis is to identify everything from all successful and unsuccessful websites and marketing tactics undertaken. The primary goal is to understand what PPC and SEO techniques are effective and how they can help improve your own site. This improved knowledge of successful marketing within your market can greatly increase the effectiveness of your own efforts and, in layman’s terms, save a lot of time and money by learning from others’ mistakes. By identifying the strengths and weaknesses of competitors, it gives a good foundation and insight to establish your online marketing and boost your SEO and PPC plans.
What’s the difference between a brand new 23-year-old with zero business experience and a man who has had the same amount of experience in his industry but has 20+ years of experience? The difference is the maturity of the two individuals regarding their business. The man who had the business for 20 years has a greater understanding of his market, including marketing his business. So if you are looking to compete against someone who has a well-established business within the same field of market as you, then it’s important to know the depths of business marketing within the market and his very own business. With this increased knowledge comes a “Competitor Analysis.”
Importance of Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis is an important component of any comprehensive SEO services engagement. In the search engine optimisation (SEO) process, there are key strategic decisions that require thorough, up-to-date, and well-informed information about the competitive environment. Often though, SEO services clients may not have a good understanding of the competitive landscape that they are a part of. In some cases, they may know just who their offline competitors are and assume that these are their online competitors. The reality is that the competitive environment in the search engines can be quite different from the offline competitive situation. In some cases, the client will know who their online competitors are but have little information about their tactics and performance in the search engines. In any event, virtually all SEO services clients overestimate their own knowledge of the competitive environment. They will usually assume they know more than they actually do because precise information about the competitive environment is often hard to come by. The primary importance of conducting competitor analysis lies in the fact that the information and insights produced as a result can be used to inform and shape a more effective SEO strategy. An informed SEO strategy is one that takes into account the competitive reality of the client and the target market and works to leverage the client’s strengths to take advantage of the identified competitors’ weaknesses. An effective SEO strategy that can increase a client’s share of search traffic should also be based on a realistic assessment of where the client can achieve improvements relative to the competition and how much time and effort it will take to do so. An effective SEO strategy must be achievable in the context of the client’s resources and the level of competition in the target market. The strategy must also be flexible and responsive to changes in the competitive environment as the long-term success of most SEO projects requires the ability to adapt and grow the strategy over time in response to changes in the market and the search engines.
Benefits of Conducting Competitor Analysis
Understanding the competitor’s business from the inside is essential. This helps in identifying their strengths and weaknesses. Identifying their strengths and copying them is not necessarily beneficial, but learning from it is. For example, if they have been in business longer, one can learn from this and search for areas of the market that have been overlooked. Learning from a competitor’s mistakes and failures is arguably more beneficial than learning from their success. It can prevent an organization from repeating the same mistakes or making wiser decisions than the competitor did. Competitor analysis provides both an offensive and defensive strategic context to identify opportunities and threats. This allows the organization to set reasonable goals upon implementation of the strategy. If the organization does not have a specific goal or is unsure of different areas, the strategy may falter and waste resources, therefore being ineffective. Understanding a competitor’s current and potential strategy will help to predict the future of the market and how an organization can define to change or create its own strategy to compete with the competitor. A key benefit of an effective competitor analysis is the provision of a springboard to learn from industry best practices. This is learning what is the best possible thing an organization could do in a certain area. This is important to test the organization and see whether it can perform the same activities as competitors at a lower cost or with greater effectiveness. If it is possible, the organization gains a core competency. This is a capability that is superior to other companies in the same industry, which results in a sustained competitive advantage. It is important, however, not to imitate the best practices of competitors too closely. This can be dangerous as a lack of knowledge and a cost-effective way of doing something may, in fact, be better than what the competitor is doing, and using the best practice may prove difficult. This involves a judgment on what can be learned from best practices and what is not worth the time and effort.
Identifying Competitors
Depending on the nature of a site, the most obvious competitors are not always the main competitors. Whether a company is offering products or services, there are always direct competitors which are companies or sites offering a similar product or service. Usually, the best method for researching direct competitors is to think of a list of keywords that a potential customer would use to find your site and see which companies are ranking highly for those keywords. This can be seen in the following example.
Seeing who your competitors are is one of the main reasons for conducting a competitor analysis, and the first basic step is to identify who your competitors actually are. Here we look at the different types of competitors.
Researching Direct Competitors
Direct competitors are those that target the same primary keywords as the domain in question, and are therefore in direct competition within the search engine results pages. An effective way to identify these competitors is to think of the keywords as defining a market, and then search for these keywords to locate the websites who are your true competitors in the SERPs. It is important to keep in mind that often a business or website will have a different idea of what market it is in and therefore who its competitors are. For this reason, it is a good idea to ask as many people in the company as possible which keywords they would use to find the company or its products. This can often highlight some internal discrepancies about which are the most important keywords to target. Once the keyword list has been defined, and the direct competitors identified, the final step is to discover the level of competition for these keywords. The level of competition for a keyword can usually be gauged by the type and authority of the domains which rank in the top 10 search results. If all of the competitors are large corporations with long-standing websites, they may be very difficult to displace from search results. If the top results are a mix of blogs, forums, small businesses, and larger businesses, there may be an opportunity to capture a more defined market by creating targeted content. If a high proportion of results are internal (i.e. they are pages from within the current website), it may indicate that the site is not, in fact, competing in the wider online market, but is effective at capturing traffic on the specific keyword. The keyword research should be an ongoing process and can take time to yield solid results, but is an important foundation for an SEO campaign.
Exploring Indirect Competitors
At a first look, you may consider direct competitors as your only competition and disregard the rest. Doing so will cause you to overlook the broader competitive landscape in which your particular segment competes for resources. It is akin to driving down the road with tunnel vision. Indirect competition can be the most threatening as it can come from any company which offers products or services that are aimed at satisfying the same customer need or market. They may not offer the same product, but it can be argued that it is the same service. Take for example disposable cutlery and crockery, it can be considered to have the same function as standard cutlery and crockery however it is aimed at a market which seeks convenience as opposed to long term use. Therefore, a company which sells the standard equipment can consider the manufacturer of disposable utensils to be indirect competition. In other cases, the competitor may not become apparent until a customer has used an indirect competitor’s product and if for whatever reason it was unsatisfactory, the customer may seek an alternative to it. This can be said for many software products and services.
Analyzing Local Competitors
The challenge of identifying and analyzing local competitors is more complex than it initially appears to be. Local competition can directly impact local business and performance for the desired keywords, but tracking the success of competing businesses isn’t as simple as noting rankings and traffic. It is often the case that a site not actively targeting the major keyword terms is a direct local competitor. This is more likely to affect smaller businesses. A good example would be a local Italian restaurant. They may not have a website or any interest in being found on the internet by general searchers, but it is still a business that is directly competing with another business of the same type. In scenarios where competition with businesses not interested in SEO or online promotion is very high, it may be decided that there is too little potential benefit in SEO. Another case is where the business is looking to build traffic on its site in order to generate leads on a national level. A local business competing with the same type of business on a national level is an indirect competitor. An SEO example of this would be a local web design company competing with a nationally known web design service. The goal here is to identify and assess types of local competition and determine which are the most important in order to decide where to focus analysis and if the potential benefits from SEO are worth it.
Analyzing Competitor Websites
Off-page SEO analysis can be done in various methods. The easiest way is by searching competitors site using link: sitename.com at Google search. However Google only shows a portion of backlinks. To get detail information, it is recommended to use backlink checker tool from SEO software such as SEO Moz and Link Diagnosis. By knowing what links on what link anchor text are directed to your competitor’s website, you try to imitate the way they got that backlink. Usually backlink can be obtained from link exchange, buying or other method. It will be your assignment to get more and better links than what your competitor has.
This is done by checking whether your competitor put their keyword in meta tags, contents, and alt tags. You should also analyze crucial on-page SEO factor such as internal linking and URL structure. By knowing what on-page optimization that your competitor has applied, you know on which point you can put more effort on to beat them.
This is the central of competitor SEO analysis. You should determine whether your competitors have applied effective SEO to be in the top 10 Google’s search result. The best way to do this is to learn their website. There are two main steps to analyze their website, which are by determining their on-page SEO and off-page SEO effectiveness.
Assessing On-Page SEO Factors
On-page factors are the aspects of a given web page that influence search engine ranking. These can be controlled by coding on that page or by the content. It is important to have targeted keywords in the actual visible content on the page. It is also beneficial to have those keywords appear in the meta tags and have relevant keywords in the title of the page. A very important factor is to have search engine friendly URLs. This can be done by including relevant keywords in the URL of the webpage. Having keyword-rich headers is also a very important factor, as search engines give higher importance to the keywords which are used in these headers. The search engines also give higher importance to the words that are bold, italicized, or underlined, so it is useful to include your targeted keywords like this. Alt text in the images on the page is useful to increase keyword relevance, and search engines also look for keyword proximity, which means how close keywords are to each other on a page. Finally, it is important to have fresh and quality content on the page, with high keyword saturation and density.
Evaluating Off-Page SEO Strategies
Off-page search engine optimization is a concept that is difficult to directly measure and assess, since it is not performed directly on the target site. The primary off-site factor that is looked at, and the most important, is the incoming links. The quantity and quality of the incoming links to a particular page is taken as an indication of the value of that page. The assumption is that people will not link to a page that is of little value to their site visitors. Using the Google Toolbar, you can view the PageRank of the page that is being linked from it, and this gives an indication of the weight that Google places on that page, and hence the more value that is passed to your page from the incoming link. Another aspect to consider is the anchor text of the incoming link. This became apparent during the Florida update, where some sites that had a high quantity of incoming links fell in rankings due to overusing the same anchor text for the incoming links. This was seen as a manipulation of the algorithm, and may have resulted in a devaluation of the anchor text. An incoming link from a site that is topically relevant to yours provides more value than a link from an unrelated site. A site that has plenty of links from topically non-relevant sources may want to employ the NoFollow attribute on some of those links to prevent the loss of potential value as a result of a possible future implementation of an algorithm that discounts the value of links from unrelated sources. A site that is involved with the sale of links and has many outgoing links may want to qualify the type of the links being sold, to prevent the devaluation of their own outgoing links and the loss of value to the site pages that the links are being sold from.
Examining User Experience and Design
By looking at the competitors’ site features and quality of HTML, you can determine what’s necessary to compete effectively with them. Sometimes a high-end feature can be costly and not feasible to implement, but other times you might find a really good idea that is worth investing in. A concise study of the small details can be the difference.
It’s important to compare how your website appears to theirs. Take notes on the site structure, color schemes, quality of HTML, site features such as AJAX or FLASH, and other high-level details. While jotting down this information, it’s good to compare the pros and cons of your site to your competitors and decide what changes can be made to provide a better user experience.
In the final stage of our research, we need to carefully analyze the design and user experience provided by our competitors. Despite the fact that search engine spiders do not index a website’s design and look at the user experience, this is a very important factor to ensure you have covered. If a consumer lands on a website and the site is hard to navigate and the user cannot find what they are looking for, the user will leave and never return. This is a lost conversion.
Utilizing Competitive Intelligence Tools
In the keyword research and analysis of the competitive intelligence tools, the first and foremost step is to identify the keywords and phrases that will be used to drive visitors to your website. This is a very simple step. It’s vitally important, however, that you make sure you are starting with the right foot. The general term for your service or product may bring in tons of traffic, but most of it will be unqualified visitors. If you are a real estate agent, receiving traffic from people looking for a travel agent is not beneficial to you. What you really want are qualified leads. For example, people looking to buy or sell their house. The more specific the phrase, the more qualified the visitor. Qualified visitors generally equals higher conversion rates. For this kind of research, it is best to have a brainstorming session to identify all the possible search phrases that your potential visitors would use. During your brainstorming session, you should be using a thesaurus and possibly a dictionary too. You will be able to generate many more phrases that mean the same thing. At this point, it is acceptable to use general terms if you feel there are qualified visitors to be had, but keep a separate list of these terms. It may be that you will want to create a second website specifically targeting the market for the general terms. As well, it may be beneficial to take another look at your current site to make sure it is properly focused on your target market.
Keyword Research and Analysis
Typically, keyword analysis will provide insight into what consumers are looking for in services. Knowing what the consumer wants will help to define the content strategy overall. When beginning keyword research, it’s wise to conduct a brainstorm within the team to come up with a list of potential keywords. These keywords can then be put into the keyword suggestion tool, providing a list of related keywords along with traffic and competition data. From there, the keywords can be broken into two groups: branded and non-branded. Keywords containing the brand name will fall into the branded category, and all other keywords which do not mention the brand can be classified as non-branded. This type of approach is important because the SEO strategy will vary between the two categories; primarily, the focus will be on non-branded keywords with the intent to improve credibility and visibility of the brand overall.
Backlink Analysis
Step three is the organization of the backlink data into a format which is usable and understandable. This can be done in a spreadsheet but ideally in a database. Step four is the analysis and comparison of the backlink data against the data of higher ranking competitors. Step five would be allotting resources based on the conclusions from the backlink analysis. Step six would be to carry out ongoing backlink analysis to identify new backlink opportunities and to monitor the backlink strategies of higher ranking competition. Step seven would be to repeat the process of comprehensive backlink analysis at regular intervals to assess its link building strategy and to make any required changes in approach.
Step one involves the compilation of a list of URLs of the links pointing to a competitor’s site. This list can then be appended to with lists of links gathered from various sources. Step two is the acquisition of backlink data for a list of URLs. Step two can be quite laborious, gathering data from links can take a long time depending on the number of links and the page rank of the pages the links are on. Step two is where backlink analysis tools can greatly decrease the time it takes to gather backlink data.
There are several factors that need to be considered in the process of analyzing competitors’ backlink profile. Backlink analysis forms a crucial part of the SEO process. Primarily, it can be used to reverse engineer a competitor’s ranking and to uncover the link sources which have allowed them to obtain high rankings. It can also provide the foundation upon which a new link building campaign can be built for a new site. Finally, backlink analysis can be used to identify patterns and trends in the link building strategies which can be applied to a search marketing approach.
Social Media Monitoring
The mechanics of social media monitoring are fairly straightforward. Given that much of social media content is public, a simple method is to proxy some search queries and scrape the data from the results. There are also a plethora of APIs and tools for this kind of thing, albeit the usefulness of these comes at the price of a subscription. As for the analysis itself, much like with backlink analysis, it involves organizing and aggregating the data into something resembling a coherent form. There are special tools designed for this kind of thing, including some which attempt to automate the process. Still, user input is often necessary to sift through all the noise and extract some useful information.
Social media monitoring, at least in a competitive sense, is quite a bit more involved than searching for mentions of your brand. It involves searching for and analyzing social media content from your competitors, including their customers’ reactions to it. While it’s arguable how much of this data is useful (or even how accurate the sentiment analysis can be), there are some insights to be gained from it. For example, what demographics seem to be engaging with your competitors, or what content is provoking strong positive/negative reactions. This information can influence your own social media marketing efforts, as well as what kind of content you put on your site.
Sotavento Medios: Unveiling Their Competitor Analysis Techniques
Here is how Sotavento Medios, an SEO service provider in Singapore conducts their competitor analysis:
Understanding the Competitive Landscape:
Identifying Key Competitors: Sotavento Medios likely utilizes SEO tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to identify their clients’ top organic and paid search competitors.
Analyzing Competitor Websites:
Keyword Research: They would research the keywords their competitors are targeting to understand their content strategy and ranking positions.
Content Audit: Sotavento Medios might analyze competitor content quality, format, and user engagement to identify potential gaps their clients can exploit.
Backlink Profile Analysis: They might assess competitor backlinks to understand their link-building strategies and identify opportunities to acquire similar or even better backlinks for their clients.
Turning Insights into Action:
Developing a Competitive Content Strategy: Sotavento Medios could create content that surpasses competitor offerings in terms of value, depth, and user experience.
Optimizing for Relevant Keywords: By identifying competitor keyword gaps, they might optimize their clients’ websites to rank for those terms and attract a wider audience.
Building a Stronger Backlink Profile: Sotavento Medios could use competitor backlink analysis to develop targeted link-building strategies to help their clients achieve a competitive edge.
