We’ve written several articles showing how performing a digital self-examination, with website, SEO, and content audits, can improve your digital marketing and sales performance, and can help you optimize your marketing strategy or campaign for better results. Looking at the same information about your competitors can also provide valuable insights by helping you see your audience and industry challenges through a different set of eyes. It’s a key step in our 9-step guide to planning your content campaign: SEO Analysis for Lead Generation.
That’s what a competitor analysis does, it examines how your competitors’ addressed the same marketing challenges you have, and what worked and what didn’t. Looking at your competitors can help you position your products and services in a specific niche, or compete head-to-head with messaging that plays to your strengths. We believe performing a competitor analysis is essential when launching a new product or entering into a new market space, industry, or vertical.
In this article we’ll share key findings and 14 ways a competitor analysis can help your marketing campaign win.
What to Look at and Tools to Use
To analyze your competitors' digital marketing performance you should:
Examine website traffic, traffic growth, backlinks and their most popular pages.
Content on their website, blog, and published on social channels.
Advertising content on both search engines and social networks.
Keywords on their website, in their content, and used with their campaigns.
We recommend the same tools to analyze your competitors that you use to analyze yourself:
SEMRush: For SEO and website audit, backlink, and keyword research. SEMRush offers some traffic analysis and competitive intelligence add-ons that allow you to perform much deeper research, but we believe these tools can provide great insights into how your competitors are marketing and positioning their products and services, and, more importantly, what’s working with their audience. Other good tools are Ahrefs and Raven Tools.
BuzzSumo: For content research. BuzzSumo can help you identify how your competitors’ content has performed, and how they’re taking part in digital question and answer sites.
Fan Page Karma: For finding content and engagement information about your competitors, including which content has been most popular with their audience, what channels and posting times get the most engagement, what topics have been most popular, and identifying questions and issues their audience has which may provide opportunities for your brand.
Insights from Traffic Analysis
Analyze the traffic to competitor websites to discover how many visitors they have, unique visitors, pages per visit, visit duration, and bounce rate which tells you how much traffic your competitors are getting, if visitors are finding the site content useful enough to stay on the site, and which content is most popular.
You can also see how visitors are finding their way to your competitor’s website.
TIP: Identify source domains to inform decisions about investing in search engine and social media advertising, as well as influencer outreach based on what’s working for your competitors.
One of the most important things you can learn is which of your competitor's website pages are most popular.
Seeing which landing pages are working best for your competitor can tell you which products and services have a successful online presence, and which don’t. That can inform your approach to marketing products and services, and to how to run your campaigns.
TIP: For a campaign designed to go head-to-head with a competing product or service that is popular, dissect the messaging on that page and find ways to differentiate your products and services. Consider promoting those messages using aggressive demand generation such as search and social advertising. Consider directly targeting keywords used on competitors’ popular pages with a bid strategy of using first page bid estimates to attempt to siphon off visitors that might otherwise go to your competitor’s page.
Backlinks
Backlinks help build your domain authority and improve your rank for topics other sites link to. Your brand’s SEO efforts should include a link building component. Tools like SEMRush and AHRefs allow you to perform a backlink gap analysis to domains linking to your competitors, but not to you. This will inform and improve your link building efforts.
Social Media
Analyzing your competitor’s social media activity can tell you which channels they use for promotion, how they’re positioning their products and services, and what content and messages have received the best reception from their audience. It can also help you find gaps in their promotion strategy which can provide an opportunity for your brand.
Tools like Fan Page Karma can provide competitive intelligence on competitors’ social media activity.
Fan Page Karma Analytics | Metrics report.
You can see the channels they’re using for promotion, how active they are, the growth in their presence on the channel, and how actively they’re engaging with their audience.
TIP: If you’re targeting the same audience as your competitor, consider focusing your activities on channels that have worked well for them.
You can also see the content they’re publishing, the topics they’re talking about, and which of those topics is of most interest to their audience.
TIP: This information can help you identify the topics that are of greatest interest to the audience, questions they have, and issues you can discuss to position the value of your products and services. Use this information to refine your content strategy, messages, and value proposition.
TIP: Look for opportunities to exploit gaps in their promotion strategy. For example, based on your content analysis, your competitor might not produce video content, and setting up a YouTube channel with how-to or case study content may allow you to reach the target audience in a new and compelling way that sets your brand apart.
Seems like too much work? Check out our Inbound Growth Plan and let us do a competitor analysis for you!
Keywords
One of the most important things you can learn from your competitors are what keywords they’re using and which they’re ranking for. Your website and campaign content should be focused around a core set of keywords that will help your target audience find your site and content when looking for the solutions you’re selling.
Your competitors will also be using and trying to rank for relevant keywords.
TIP: Examine the keywords used by your competitors to find industry specific keywords that you might be able to rank higher for in your site and campaign content, and to formulate long tail keyword variants that you can rank for, and that differentiate your products and services from your competitors.
Another great feature offered by SEMRush and other tools is the ability to report frequently asked questions related to keywords and domains.
TIP: Develop lists of top questions about problems you solve, and the products and services you sell and create content that answers those questions. You can also take a more interactive approach and actively participate in Q&A sites and forums like Quora and Reddit and answer questions relevant to the products and services you sell, and post links back to your website content for additional information.
Advertising information
Analyzing your competitors advertising information can save you a lot of time researching and formulating critical campaign elements like keywords and ad copy, and help you position your products and services more effectively.
A tool like SEMRush can show you traffic estimates, keywords, and cost estimates for paid search traffic, display advertising, and product listing ads.
TIP: The keywords used by your competitors are a great starting point for the keywords you can use for your brand and campaign. You may be able to compete successfully for core keywords, but you can certainly use this information to choose long tail keyword variants that work well with the value proposition of your brand, products, and services.
You can see position changes for keywords used by your competitors.
TIP: Position changes can be an indicator of trends in keyword usage, and can help you further find new keywords and refine long tail combinations for your content and in PPC campaigns.
You can even see competitor’s ad copy.
TIP: Seeing how your competitors are promoting their products and services shows you how they’re positioning their products and services and lets you construct website and ad copy to position yourself differently, by going after a slightly different niche, or lets you counterpunch and go head-to-head positioning your value in ways that can win.
Content Analysis
In a different article we discussed how analyzing your own content can boost your digital marketing performance and in that article we talk about identifying your best and worst posts and determining the best time to post on social networks. You can find the same information about your competitors.
While you should look at the stats about your competitors content, the best value will come from close examination of the content itself. When looking at your competitors best content, you can see if similar topics are a good fit for your brand, and see the type of content their audience likes to consume. You can also discover gaps in content coverage, and frequently asked questions which your brand and address in its content campaign. Look at their poor performing content to try and determine why it didn’t resonate.
TIP: Analyze competitor’s content with the goal of finding the best way to differentiate your content and messages to favorably stand apart from the pack. Do deep analysis to find trends and see if the audience prefers, longer or shorter content, fundamental or deeper analysis, conceptual vs. how-to content, graphics, videos, images, etc..
TIP: Look for inspiration in your competitors' content and use it to talk about your brand in an inspired way. Get your team of experts around a table, review some of your competitors best content, and capture the discussion that follows. That practice will get your team’s competitive instincts to kick in, and allow you to capture a lot of information that can be seeds for all sorts of good content and outreach.
TIP: Analyze with an eye for lead generation by looking for how your competitors are capturing visitor’s email addresses. Are they using content offers, registrations, and subscriptions? With the other analysis you're doing you may be able to figure out what’s working and what’s not. This might help inform any number of campaign decisions such as focusing on creating downloadable content offers like ebooks, or running a webinar series.
TIP: Analyze competitor content to see how they are talking to the audience at different stages of the customer journey. Look for content that identifies problems and raises awareness at the top of funnel (TOFU), comparative, feature usage, and case study content to aid decision making at the middle of the funnel (MOFU), and content designed to drive actions may turn leads into customers at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU). Your content should speak to your audience at all of those stages, and an analysis like this gives you the opportunity to see if and how your competitors are doing that. Use this information to make your content and messaging stronger in areas where your competitors are lacking, to better target your specific niche, and to promote key strengths of your products and services.
