This post originally appeared on Searchenginewatch.com
30-second summary:
- SEMrush have created the guide ‘How to Do Online Competitor Analysis’ to help you start looking at what your competitors are doing.
- Analyzing your competitors’ digital marketing strategy can help you optimize your campaign and your upcoming ideas to improve both your short and long-term wins.
- A website traffic analysis can help you learn more about your biggest competitors, their performance the past months, their audience and whether there had been any big changes to their results.
- A good way to get started is to explore the general overview of your competitors’ digital strategy, their traffic, the most popular locations and whether there are any seasonal trends. The analysis will help you dive deeper into the market trends and how they compare to your own performance.
- You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to run a successful advertising campaign. It’s okay to look at your competitors’ ads to find inspiration for your upcoming campaigns.
- You can analyze your competitors’ online mentions, social media presence, their overall reputation and the number of backlinks to get a better idea of their strengths and weaknesses.
- Competitor analysis can help multiple teams for both short and long terms goals in your business. Start by looking at different strategies and channels and make sure you gather the findings in one place to evaluate your own performance.
A frequent review of your digital marketing strategy can help you stay successful with your tactics. However, focusing on your own tactics is not enough nowadays. You should be able to know what your competitors are doing and how you can outperform them.
Analyzing your competitors’ digital marketing strategy can help you optimize your campaign and your upcoming ideas to improve both your short and long-term wins.
SEMrush have created the guide ‘How to Do Online Competitor Analysis’ to help you start looking at what your competitors are doing.
Here are some ideas on how to get started:
Content produced in partnership with SEMrush.
Analyze the competitors’ site traffic
A look at your competitors’ website traffic can provide many useful insights. You can start by mapping out your competitors and how their online presence is performing.
A website traffic analysis can help you discover more details about your competitors’ digital marketing strategy, their performance over the past months and whether there had been any big changes to their results.
You can also look at their most popular channels to decide how you can adjust your digital marketing strategy based on the findings.
After the first review of their website traffic, you can narrow down the analysis to focus on your closest competitors.
It can also be useful to review any trends and seasonal changes that might affect the traffic and what these changes could mean to your own tactics.
Analyze the competitors’ SEO tactics
If you want to build a long-term digital marketing strategy then you need to include SEO to your plans. Improving your ranking in search results can lead to a consistent number of views to your website every month.
You should also look at your competitors’ ranking to explore how you can rank higher than them.
A good way to get started is to analyze a target website’s organic search visibility on a daily basis.
The analysis can help you explore your competitors’ best keywords, their average monthly search traffic but also their most successful pages.
The learnings can help you optimize your campaign and your content so that you target the right keywords. You can also explore potential keyword gaps to help you rank higher at a shorter time.
Analyze your competitors’ online ads
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to run a successful advertising campaign. It’s okay to look at your competitors’ ads to find inspiration for your upcoming campaigns.
Analyzing your competitors’ online ads can help you find out useful information, such as:
- the number of keywords bidding on
- average traffic coming from keywords
- estimated paid traffic cost
- websites your rivals are competing with
- historical data to analyze seasonal changes in your competitors’ ads
The learnings can help you spot opportunities that your competitors might be missing or even specific markets that you can tap into.
You can even use the data to explore new ways to improve your ROI, from picking different keywords to trying out new channels and audiences.
Analyze your competitors’ content marketing and PR efforts
If you want to improve your content marketing strategy then it’s good to look at what your competitors are doing in terms of content and PR.
You can analyze your competitors’ online mentions, social media presence, their overall reputation and the number of backlinks to get a better idea of their strengths and weaknesses.
An analysis of their content marketing and PR efforts can help you understand your target audience and also the opportunities that you can explore.
For example, if you want to reach a very niche audience and your competitors have already created too much content and are popular then you may want to explore the missing opportunities that you can tap into.
It can be a new channel, a new content type or an opportunity to think outside the box.
You can also get inspired by their content marketing tactics and adjust them to fit your own objectives.
Analyze your competitors’ social media presence
Your social media presence can tell a lot about your digital marketing strategy. Imagine looking at your competitors’ social media presence!
Your competitor analysis can include a closer look at your competitors’ social channels, their frequency of posting, their engagement rate and their most popular channels.
It can help you discover opportunities of standing out by learning from your competitors’ mistakes.
Whether it’s the tone of voice, a sudden post that got viral or even the use of the new channel, there are many useful insights that you can explore.
Putting the learnings into action
Right after understanding how your competitors are doing in digital channels, it’s time to make the most of these learnings.
The best way to use competitor analysis is to incorporate the findings to your digital marketing strategy and your upcoming campaigns.
How can you use the findings then?
Here are some ideas from the SEMrush team:
- Reevaluate your benchmarks and your performance based on your objectives
- Compare your digital marketing strategy and results with your competitors’ tactics
- Include the learnings to your understanding of the target audience
- Be flexible and open to change based on your findings
- Share the learning with other internal teams or agencies you work with
Competitor analysis can help multiple teams for both short and long terms goals in your business. Start by looking at different strategies and channels and make sure you gather the findings in one place to evaluate your own performance.
To find out more details on how to perform a competitor analysis, download SEMrush’s guide here.
