Why perform competitive analysis?

However unique your product, however specialized your service, it’s almost certain that there are others out there offering something similar. These are your competitors, and in order to outpace them, it is vital that you know as much as possible about their business. 

This is competitive analysis — the process of gathering information about rival businesses and transforming key insights into actionable improvement strategies.

How It’s Done (the whole buffalo)

The only worthwhile competitive analysis is a holistic one. Every aspect of a rival business must be inspected, every growth strategy evaluated. To properly analyse a competitor, you need to use the whole buffalo. Every part of the beast, from its SEO strength and page structure to its sales channels and marketing solutions, are essential to your overall understanding of your competitors.

Assess your competition

You can’t use the whole buffalo if you don’t know who the buffalo is. To establish a fully realized map of your competitive landscape, start by identifying your industries main players and pinpointing which among them are your direct competitors. 

Shoot for at least 10 competitors. And then …

Get analyzing

If identifying your competitors helps you map the competitive landscape, then analyzing their information helps you traverse it. Once you know the ins and outs of their business processes and growth strategies, you can develop key benchmarks to hit in order to gain an edge over the competition. 

For example:

• Search Engine Visibility: How many web pages do you and your competitors have indexed? Could you outpace a competing company by indexing more pages so it’s easier for users to find your website?

• Organic Keywords: How many keywords do you each rank for? Would integrating more keywords – or increasing the number of certain keywords – enhance your traffic?
• Visitor Behavior: How long do visitors stay on each of your websites? How many pages do they read per visit? What pages of theirs outperform yours? How could you close that gap?

Answering these questions demystifies the competition and clarifies every potential barrier that could keep you from reaching the top.

Target their gaps

You know the great thing about competitors? They’ve already done half the work for you. By evaluating what strategies have and have not worked for them, you can uncover gaps in your own strategies, as well as new opportunities to drive business growth. 

At this point, your competitive analysis should have uncovered multiple competitive gaps that you can exploit. If their search engine visibility outperforms yours, figure out what strategy they’re using and apply those tenets to your own. If their search engine visibility is lacking, figure out what strategy they’re using so you don’t make the same mistakes

Now rinse and repeat with every other gap you uncover.

Media

Media is one of the meatiest parts of the buffalo. This includes print media, digital media, outdoor media, and beyond. You’ll want to devote a lot of resources to deciphering where your competitors are spending their media budget. What types of media do they favor? What geographical regions do they focus on? What’s working and what isn’t?

Once have a handle on your competitor’s media strategy, you can either:

• Advertise where they are

Example: if through a competitive analysis you’ve discovered that a rival business has an annual media budget of $5 million spread across print and digital, you can try outspending them across the board, or restructuring your budget to outspend them in one particular arena.

• Advertise where they are not

Example: if a competitor is spending $5 million in print and digital, but less, or nothing, on outdoor media, go there. If a competitor is overlooking some key geographic opportunities, go there. Knowing what channels they’re using and how much they’re spending enables you to intelligently buy and place your own media.

Growth Opportunities & Low-Competition Niches

We’ve touched on these ideas a bit, but to hammer it home, a comprehensive competitive analysis can shine a light on areas worth growing, and poorly defended niches worth seizing. 

Even if you’re entering an extremely crowded marketplace, your competitors can’t be everywhere at once, and they can’t employ every strategy successfully. So when you discover an area where your competitor falls short, such as content creation or social media presence, look at it as an opportunity to do what they’re trying to do, but better. 

Common Questions

Why are your top organic and paid keywords important to your business? 

There are nearly 120 million English-language keywords in the SEMRush database. Which ones are going to drive traffic and leads to your website? Your site’s ranking lives and dies by its SEO keyword strategy, and a strong strategy starts with the correct keywords. These are the keywords that actually convert visitors into customers, subscribers, and followers. And without the correct keyword positionings, even the most brilliant marketing strategy will ultimately fail

Why research related top keywords? 

A thorough keyword research process ensures you identify the most relevant keywords with the highest traffic and commercial potential for your particular business. It also helps you find gaps in your competitors’ keyword strategy and devise a content strategy that reflects your research and your business goals. Getting keyword research right has a major impact on content marketing, link building, and other SEO and promotional activities down the line.

How do you optimize your website and advertising for organic and paid keywords?

Collect

The first step in keyword optimization is to collect the best keywords. Begin by building a seed list to establish the baseline of keywords and phrases most relevant to your business. Then pull the keywords you already rank for, as well as the keywords your competitors rank for. It’s also smart to mine social media platforms and message boards, as questions asked by, say, Quora or Twitter users are simply problems someone needs solving.

Filter

Once you’ve collected your keywords, filter them through specific criteria, including keyword difficulty, search volume, short tail vs. long tail, and search intent.

Opportunities

Use advanced tools like SEMRush to establish customer intent and distill your keywords and phrases to a refined concentration. This gets rid of the fluff, leaving you with new opportunities to drive traffic to your business. 

Group

Finally, arrange keywords and phrases by topic and intent, and organize them into a database so they’re poised for use.

Why perform an industry analysis?

While not technically part of a competitive analysis, consider going the extra mile by performing an industry analysis for a birds eye view of your overall market sector. An industry analysis generally establishes the supply and demand within your industry, whether the industry is growing, shrinking, or stagnating, and any opportunities worth seizing. It can also illuminate the reasons behind these developments. What’s causing the demand to surge or dwindle? Why are there performance gaps in the market? Are the reasons political, social, economic?

Performing an industry analysis answers these questions, giving you a more well-rounded understanding of the competitive landscape.

Competitor Research Package

If you’re ready to outpace your competition, our competitor research package will leave them in the dust. We do a deep dive into your industry to understand what products are being offered, how they are being sold, and how they are being used. We eavesdrop on your competitors and pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses. And we measure the brand awareness of your target audience and identify their pain points. 

Then we translate all that delicious insight into concrete solutions you can implement immediately.