How to do a competitor analysis, and why you should

 


We all get stuck in a marketing slump sometimes. As businesses, we tend to stick with old habits in our marketing, and it can be hard to recognise when things stop working effectively until the well of fresh clients dries up.

This happened to me recently. I spent ages looking forlornly at my website and my blog wondering why the numbers were so abysmal, and why my Google ranking was practically non-existent.

I knew that I’d neglected things, but I had no idea how to fix it. So I decided to look at my competition to see if I could get some insight as to what was working for them – how did they manage to get to the top of Google? What were they doing well, and where were they showing up? And how could I learn from them, and implement some of what I learned into my own marketing?

As it turned out, it was a really useful exercise, and it helped me to identify a lot of holes and errors, as well as giving me a tonne of inspiration for ways in which I could improve my marketing going forward. And I’d like to share my findings and show you how you can do the same.

What is a competitor analysis?

Some websites refer to it as a competitive analysis, but it’s the same thing. In basic terms, it’s an exercise where you identify and research your direct search competitors’ marketing and SEO tools, and apply those learnings to your own marketing.

A little caveat here – while you should never, ever directly copy any of the content that you find, it is perfectly ok to mimic the tools and techniques that your competitors use – and you absolutely should. I’ll discuss that in more detail later in the article, as well as some of the things that I did when I completed my own competitor analysis.

This exercise will help you to see which of your competitors are smashing it on the top spots on Google (therefore who know what they’re doing with SEO and keywords), and allow you the opportunity to dig into their websites, social media pages, and other marketing tools, to find out why they’re so successful. Learning these things will give insight into what action you can take to level up your own online marketing, and perhaps even grab one of those top spots in the future, too!

How to identify your competitors

First things first – who are your competitors, and how the heck do you find them?

Here’s where knowing your ideal search criteria and keywords comes in handy if you don’t know them, you need to start there. What I mean by this is that you absolutely need to be clear on what your ideal clients are searching for in order to find you. For example, you might be a local bookshop, in which case, your ideal clients are people looking for things like, ‘bookshops near me’, ‘bookshops in [Swindon]’, etc. If you’re not a ‘local’ business, your keywords will be broader. Learn them, know them, and use them.

Next, input your targeted search enquiry into Google. The results you see are your direct competitors – the ones you’d love to knock off that top spot and see your own website appear. And these are the websites that you’re going to delve into, assess, and apply fixes to your own marketing.

Key factors to assess

You’ll need to know which factors to assess, but before I go into that, an important point. Keep things simple so that you don’t get overwhelmed. My advice would be to focus on the top 3-5 competitors on page 1 of Google, and don’t be tempted to go down the rabbit hole of researching every business that looks interesting.

Now, what information should you look for?

In your competitor analysis, the aim of the exercise is to research the top few results for businesses similar to yours, and find out what elements of their marketing make them stand out – and have placed them at the top of Google. By reading through their content and drilling down into their main methods of online marketing, you’ll gain some insight into how they market their business, and what they’re doing that you could potentially implement into your own business. You’ll want to think about:

·        How their website is structured – how many pages they have and what those pages include.

·        What information they have on their home page, and the keywords used.

·        Where and how they have used links – are they internal or external?

·        The style and tone of their content.

·        Whether they have a blog, and how frequently they post to it.

·        Which social media channels they use, and how and what they post there.

·        Whether or not they offer any lead magnets or newsletter sign-up options on their website – and where they do this.

Competitor strengths, and how to implement them into your business

Now that you have all of that information, how does your website stack up? What are those top-ranking businesses doing that you are not?

Have a look through your findings, and compare that with your own marketing. What is it about those websites that works? What do their websites look like? And are there any things you could change on your own website to emulate those things?

From my own competitor analysis, I realised that my home page was very poor for my chosen keywords. It also failed to tell my readers what my benefits were, and what action they could take next. Those were the first things I addressed.

I also realised that nowhere on my website did I use internal or external links. Now, here’s a little-known secret – Google uses links in order to rank web pages, amongst other things. I didn’t know that, but if a web page doesn’t have at least a link or 2 pointing to it – whether that’s internal or from somewhere else, it simply cannot find it. So I put some work into linking some of my pages together, and also placed some links from my social media channels to my blogs and my website.

I also took notes on what, exactly, these businesses were doing away from their websites. How did they ‘do’ social media? What did they post about? How often did they post, engage, and link back to their web pages? Did they have a newsletter, and how did they get people to sign up for it?

These are all essential elements of modern marketing, and most are pretty easy to emulate for your own business.

Make a habit of doing a competitor analysis on your blog posts

In truth, even after you’ve completed this exercise, there will always be things you can do to improve your online presence. A website isn’t a static thing, it’s a work in progress. One of the simplest and most effective ways to update and freshen up your website is, of course, your blog.

Getting into the habit of doing a quick competitor analysis on your blog posts is useful for 2 reasons; it helps you to understand what’s popular (i.e., what’s being searched for), and gives you inspiration. You might have what you believe is an amazing idea for a post, but doing a quick search for how others have tackled the subject serves to give you valuable insight into which existing blog posts are ranking highly, and why.

Before you write your post, have a poke around. Take note of the subjects, keywords, headings, length etc. Are those articles missing anything that you can fill in? How can you cover the subject better?

Over to you

Very few small businesses, as far as I can tell, bother to conduct any type of competitor analysis, which is a shame because it can be so beneficial. It can be as in-depth as you want it to be, and even a cursory glance through some of your competitors’ websites can give you so much valuable insight and inspiration that you can use for your own online marketing campaigns. If you’ve spent a lot of time struggling to hit on something that works to bring new business through to your website, doing a competitor analysis could very well be the key.

I know from my own analysis it was quite eye-opening how many gaping holes I had in my website – which I’m now in the process of filling. Yes, it’s extra work, but I think that it’s worth it. Only my future Google Analytics will tell!

Have you ever tried this exercise? Let me know how it was for you – and if this article has inspired you to want to try your own competitor analysis, tell me about that, too!

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