Examining the performance of your website in comparison to that of your competitors may appear to be a waste of time that would divert your attention away from more vital business issues. “We can only think about ourselves and not on our opponents,” as every sports coach has said. Isn’t it the same for a business in the digital era in that regard as well?”

When you examine your own and your competitors’ websites, you can gain insight into how to improve the online presence of your own business

. Remembering to keep your eyes on the larger picture is an excellent strategy to stay on track. The importance of “learning from others’ successes and failures” outweighs the importance of “worrying about your adversary,” although both are critical.

This is due to the fact that it contains numerous positive characteristics. You can examine how your website compares to other websites, as well as where its faults and strengths are located, allowing you to make changes to improve your website’s overall performance and effectiveness. At that point, you might be able to determine which aspects of your approach need to be adjusted and which aspects could be used as a roadmap for future success. Finally, you will be able to create a more specific digital strategy for the growth and success of your business as a result of the information it has provided.

What is Competitors Analysis?

Starting with the fundamentals, let’s look at the definition of “competitive analysis.” Market research is the process of finding and analyzing the marketing methods and business characteristics of your website/business/ or app that are functioning in a specific market niche.

For the most part, competition analysis is performed in order to determine the strengths and weaknesses of other market participants, to define your company’s position in relation to them, to identify gaps and assess your ability to close them, among other things.

Pro’s of Competitors Analysis

Competitive research can assist you in acquiring a better understanding of how your competitor operates as well as identifying areas where you can surpass your competitor in certain areas.

Besides that, it allows you to stay up to date with market trends and ensure that your product meets – and exceeds — industry requirements on a consistent basis.

Let’s have a look at some of the other benefits of conducting competitive analysis:

• helps you in identifying your product’s distinctive value proposition and what makes it stand out amongst rivals’ offers, which can then be used to inform future marketing initiatives.

• The ability to determine what your competitors are doing correctly. This information is essential for staying up to date and ensuring that both your product and marketing campaigns outperform industry norms and expectations.

• When your competitors fall short, you can use this information to identify areas of opportunity in the sector and test out fresh, original marketing approaches that your competitors haven’t explored before.

• Insights from customer evaluations might assist you in determining what features are missing from a competitor’s product and how you might include those features into your own.

• It establishes a benchmark against which your progress can be compared in the future.

How to do Competitors Analysis

1. Find out who your competitors are and how they differ from you.

Identifying your true competition is essential before you can begin comparing data, so that you can ensure that you are doing it correctly. What works for a firm similar to yours may not be effective for your company’s brand.

Do you know how to do it?

Then consider two categories of “competitors”: those who compete directly and those who compete indirectly.

Your direct competitors are businesses who produce or sell the same products or services that you do and are located in the same geographic area as you.

Despite the fact that products from indirect competitors may not be identical, they may be able to meet the same client needs or solve the same problems as those from direct competitors.

Despite the fact that it appears straightforward on paper, these two terms are frequently misconstrued. When evaluating your brand’s position in the marketplace, only direct competitors should be considered. Many brands struggle to compete in this market.

2. Competitors product analysis

Start by looking at how your competitors promote their businesses if you want to understand more about them and use that information to better your marketing. After getting a sense of their company, you should look at their products to see how you may market them as the first item on your list.

It’s critical that you consider their product’s primary characteristics and what distinguishes it from the competition before making a decision (USP). Check to identify what your product lacks when compared to your competitors’ products, and seek for areas in which your product has an advantage over your competitors’ products. This knowledge can be applied by business owners to determine their own unique selling point and to emphasise the benefits and distinctive aspects of their products in marketing campaigns.

3. Do some research into your competitors’ sales methodologies.

Conducting a sales study of your competitors’ products can be challenging.

You’ll want to find out the answers to the following questions:

• How is the sales process structured?
• Which distribution channels do they use?
• Do they have several sites, and if so, how does this benefit them?
• Are they growing? Scaling back?
• Do they provide resale schemes to partners?
• What are the causes behind their consumers’ refusal to purchase? For severing their ties with the business?
• How much money do they earn each year? What about the entire volume of sales?
• Are their items or services often discounted?
• How much involvement does the salesperson have in the process?
• These valuable pieces of information will help you determine how competitive the sales process is and what knowledge you should provide your sales agents with in order to compete during the final buy stage.

Annual reports for publicly traded corporations are available online, but you’ll need to perform some detective work to obtain this information for privately held enterprises, or else you can hire digital marketing expert to help you with this work.

You may be able to glean some of this information by checking your CRM and contacting clients who indicated they were evaluating your rival. Determine why they choose your product or service over others available.

4. Web Traffic

You need to figure out which of your competitors gets the most traffic and page views, as well as how interested their audiences are in their own sites or articles. This could show you a lot about the digital marketing strategies that work best in your area of business. Because you don’t have access to your competitors’ Google Analytics, the best way to figure out how many people visit their websites is to use tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush.

Keep in mind that even though these programmes use their own traffic prediction algorithm, the end result may be different from reality. Also, knowing where most of their clicks come from can be important. To start with, it will show you where this audience lives. You can use this information to expand the market or customise your advertising efforts to the needs and expectations of a specific group of people. As a second step, looking at which websites, platforms, or social networks get the most traffic can help you figure out which channels should be used for advertising, as well as which channels may not be used as much as they should be at the moment.

5. Examine and compare the content of competitors.

After you’ve determined who your rivals are, you can begin conducting a competitive analysis and digging a little deeper to gain a better understanding of what they have to provide.

If you take a look at their content, you might be able to figure out how you might assist them in outperforming their competitors. It’s critical to be aware of what your competitors are producing, quality blog posts? There are also case studies, but I’m not aware of any of them at this time. What about content that is paid for?

Is there anything that requires a password to access? Is there a newsletter, a YouTube channel, or a podcast that I can subscribe to?

Once you understand what they’re talking about, you can assess how wonderful it is and compare it to your own experience.

Take into consideration how frequently they post, add, and update new content, as well as the topics they cover.

At the end of the day, do they do anything that you are unable to accomplish?

6. Make sure you know what your competitors are doing with SEO.

While marketing will undoubtedly dominate your investigation, it is critical to pay close attention to their search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. This can be accomplished by employing tools to research your competition. All of these tools are fairly similar to the ones that are used by you to keep track of your own SEO data while running campaigns for clients. Keep the following points in mind:

Website Performance: How many visitors do they receive to their website on a regular basis? Do they receive any feedback from those who come to their site and use their services? What words do people use to search for a phrase, and how highly does their website rank for these words, are two questions that need to be answered. Is their website solely available in English, or does it also have other languages available to visitors?

Performance on Social Media: How many followers do they have on each social media site, and how many of them are active? The posts they create typically receive a large number of likes, comments, and shares. They employ a variety of hashtags, and how frequently do they appear in hashtag search results depends on their activity.

7. Analyze the company’s social media presence, strategies, and preferred platforms.

As a last step in your marketing strategy, keep an eye on how many people are following your competitors on social media.

What strategies do your competitors employ to promote their businesses on social media? Adding social media sharing buttons to each article is a good idea. In the header, footer, or anywhere else on the site, your competition has a link to their social media accounts. These ought to be readily apparent. There are no calls to action next to these buttons.

It’s a good idea to learn more about a social media platform that your competitors are using in order to gain an advantage over them. Analyze how your competitors are making use of a new social media platform to determine its value. You should start by looking in the following locations:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Snapchat
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Pinterest

Then, take note of the quantitative data from each platform as follows:

• Fan/follower count
• Consistency and frequency of posting
• Engagement with content (Do users leave comments or share their posts?)
• Viral nature of their content (How many shares, repins, and retweets do their postings receive?)

8. Find out what their (SWOT) strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are.

Now that you’ve acquired all of your data, it’s time to analyse it in a way that will help you determine your position in relation to the rest of the field. Additionally, there are several ways to strengthen your plan and considerations to keep in mind as you proceed through this process.

A SWOT analysis is an excellent tool for sorting through all of this information. In a SWOT analysis, you examine your firm and the competitors in detail to determine what is good and negative about both.

The critical point to remember is that your brand’s strengths and weaknesses are determined by internal factors. Generally, these are things you’re doing well and things you should improve on.

Opportunities and threats are determined by events occurring outside of your company: events occurring in your competition that you must be aware of.

Strength: As you learn more about a company, you can think about its strengths: a strong brand, loyal customers, a strong balance sheet, and unique technology. For example, a hedge fund may have come up with a unique way to trade that consistently outperforms the market. It then has to figure out how to best use those findings to get new investors to come in.

Weakness: Weaknesses stop an organisation from working at its best. They are things that the business needs to work on in order to stay competitive: a bad brand, high revenue, too much debt, a weak supply chain, or not enough cash.

Opportunities: Opportunities are things that happen outside of a company that can help it and give it a competitive advantage. For example, if a government lowers tariffs on cars, a manufacturer can export them to a new market, which means more sales and market share.

Threats: Threats are things that could harm an organisation. They are things like events or circumstances that could. For example, a drought is a threat to a wheat-producing company because it could kill or reduce the amount of wheat that can be grown. Other threats include rising material costs, more competition, and a lack of manpower.

Wrapping it up:

It is important to stress that competitor analysis is not a one-time thing that you do once, get the results, and then forget about. It has to be done all the time.

Tracking your competitors’ online activity is very important, because if you don’t, you could be caught off guard by their new ideas and miss the chance to profit from their mistakes. Having the right information about what your rival is doing and reacting quickly to their actions can make all the difference in modern business.

Another thing to remember about competitive intelligence is that you are more important than your competitors are.

When it comes to marketing, don’t risk making the same mistakes your competitors have already made. Instead, build your competitive advantage on the marketing strategies your competitors have already used.

It’s a dog eat dog world out there.