Online competitor analysis allows you to compare your website’s performance to that of your competitors. An online competitor analysis is an extremely useful research tool, which can provide you with an insight into your competitors’ online marketing strategies. Conducting a competitor analysis on a regular basis will definately give you an edge in the cyber environment.
Benefits of a competitor analysis
A competitor analysis will help you understand your Competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Strategic use of online business intelligence will strengthen your competitive advantage and will improve your business decisions. Benefits of a competitor analysis include:
- Learn the organic keywords that competitors are targeting and the rankings they are achieving
- Identify their paid search strategies, keywords, ads and landing pages
- Work out your competitors estimated monthly online marketing budgets
- Identify your competitors email marketing campaigns
- See which of your competitors are doing social media marketing
Some factors to consider when conducting a competitor analysis
- Backlinks – The number of external links pointing to your competitors webpages
- Domain age – Check the age of a domain
- PPC – Always check for the keywords, landing pages & ads that your competitors are using
- Website Traffic – www.compete.com can give you an indication of what your competitors are getting
- Inbound Link Anchor Text – This will tell you the type of keywords your competitors are trying to promote for their website
Some useful Competitor Analysis Tools
Here are some of the tools you can use to analyse your online competitors
- Google insights – This will show you keywords that are popular and most popular regions of interest
- Google trends – gives you an estimation of the amount and type of traffic to a particular site. It also offers a listing of search terms used to reach that site.
- SEO Elite – this tool will tell you the number of links that are pointing to your competitor’s websites.