How to do Competitive Analysis

Keeping a track of your competition is necessary in order to understand your strong and week points, it also helps keep a track of what’s trendy and what’s happening in the market. It is beneficial to know what your completion is up to. There are many tools that can help you quickly know the Keeping a track of your competition.

Here a few effective ways to do competitive analysis:

Analyse your own strategy: Before looking into someone else’s house, it is wise to check one’s own house and figure out loopholes if any. Analysis your strategy, your strengths and weakness.

Backlinks: Check the quality of backlinks. Flush out the useless or bad backlinks with the help of WebCEO.

Scan your website for technical glitches: Use WebCEO tool to scan your website for any technical issues.

Keywords: Check all your keywords – short tail and long tail. Figure out where the competition has an advantage in the search volumes. You can again use WebCEO tool.

Social media presence: Check if you are present on the important social media platforms and assess the quality of the content that you have posted there, is it relevant to the readers, does it encourage engagement or likes, etc. Use WebCEO tool to help you analyse this better.

Choose your competition diligently: Competition is someone who is trying to target the same customer group as you, hence find them as fast as you can. The best way to quickly know about them is by putting the keywords relevant to your business in the search bar. The brand’s whose websites is getting listed on first or a few following pages, would be your competition. If you already know your competition and want to study more about them, then you can directly put their website URL and scan their website. You can use SEO tools to get more accurate results about your competitors, like the Most Dangerous Competitor tool of WebCEO. It will show you the search results of websites which are competing with you for specific keywords. Getting insights from customers is also a very effective way to know the closest competition.

Be careful to not spend unnecessary time and efforts behind companies or individual who are not your completion in true sense, you will be wasting a lot of your precious resources behind them and gain absolutely nothing.

Study competitor websites: After finalizing the list of competitors, start analysing them in terms of their website design, page titles, content, heads, footers, call for action etc. Implement elements which are missing in your website and strengthen the ones which are already your strong points.

Check competitor keyword ranking: Figure out the keywords through which they are trying to catch the fish (customer) and if that fish is the one desired by you too then check where you stand in terms of ranking. If your ranking is above than your competitors then you are better place in this competitive analysis. But if the ranking order is reverse, then you need to start taking action to correct it.

But try to ensure that selection of correct keyword for this strategy. Otherwise you will be wasting your time behind a competitor, who is really not your competitor.

Check their backlinks: Backlinks are important tools for the success of a digital campaign and ensuring website ranking. Study the backlinks of your competitors and compare them to your own.

If the domains where your competitors have placed their backlinks are neutral, then you can place your content with backlinks to your website as well. Also find out the backlinks where your competitors have not reached yet. Get there fast and be there first!

Study their social media activities: New generation spends more than on the digital and social media platform, rather than the traditional media. Facebook, twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn are some of the popular social media players with huge fan following. Place your good quality and engaging content everywhere, like images, blogs, quiz contests, trivia, free downloadable material etc. You can take a cue from the competition’s online activities. A good social media strategy garners audience likes, shares, comments and reviews; this in turn is noticed by search engine crawlers and your website ranking improves.

Check their social reputation: Study the negative reviews or comments that your competition is receiving and ensure that you don’t land in the same situation. Try to keep your online reputation clean so that bad social reputation doesn’t come in the way of your online promotion campaign. It is better to avoid a problem rather than getting into a problem and then scrambling to find a solution.

Last but not the least – Learn from your competition and try to outperform them in an ethical way. Don’t just look at them with hatred, check what they are doing right and how they are doing it. Implement it for your brand. Avoid repeating their mistakes and stay clear or troubles or controversies.