One of the best business strategies to grow your company or website is performing a competitor site analysis, regardless of the niche you’re dealing with. A competitor website analysis gives you insights into who you’re up against in the same field and where your efforts should be more focused on beating them.
A study by TMF&A and Smart Insights shows you how 50% of companies that are into digital marketing do not have precise strategies to execute their marketing goals, making them directionless. That’s where a website competitor analysis comes in. A quick analysis of your rival’s content can show you where you need to improve, understand your weaknesses, and strive to improve.
In this article, we talk about how you can conduct a proper website competitor analysis.
Why performing a website competitor analysis is essential?
A big part of today’s world is being competitive regardless of what it is, so it is critical to be on top of everyone you compete with. Performing a website competitor analysis helps you understand how your rivals operate, what their most significant strengths are, and how they stay on top.
After a thorough competitor website analysis, you can adequately initiate their strategies on your website and look for ways to beat them at their own game. For example, most customers find products and weigh up the good and the bad online instead of directly from the company.
A study by Fleishman-Hillard on digital influence shows that 89% of consumers search for information about products online before purchasing. This means that website just like yours but is more successful will have information on all the products precisely like yours.
A competitor website analysis will show you exactly what they do to stay on top. For, e.g., what keywords they use, their SEO strategies, and more.
How to perform a proper website competitor analysis?
Identify your top competition
You might already know who your top competition is, or you can start finding companies that offer the same products or services as you by using free tools like SimilarWeb . You can make a list of 10 or more websites by entering the URL of your website or the website of your top competitor and clicking the “Similar Sites” option.
Another old-schooled version of finding your top competitor is to search for top keywords based on your niche on Google and look at the websites that appear in the results. Since most people don’t go past the first page of the result, the top results receive at least 60% of the search traffic. Simplest and free yet highly effective.
The key is to focus on the main competition but make sure you get data on the websites that don’t look like a direct threat (indirect competitors); they have the potential to grow over time. Learning the bare business-to-business (B2B) landscape assures this theory since companies venture out into new things outside their original industries.
Evaluate your top competitors’ top content
You can work on understanding what your top competitor provides or does to gain the most traffic. An effective and easy way to do this is by looking at their top content and learning their business strategies, including the keywords they use, how informative their contents are, and what they primarily focus on.
With an abundance of tools on the internet that you can use to track your website competitor’s keywords and backlinks and such, the best tool you can opt for is SEMRush. Although expensive, SEMRush has the edge over most tools in the game. You can start with the free version that can effectively give you 10 results per day.
All you possibly need to do is enter the URL of your Top website competitor that you listed down from your research and get the insight into data like the keywords they use, which brings the most traffic in for them.
Backlinks are important
Another effective way to do a proper website competitor analysis is to compare backlinks. Backlinks help you pick out gaps that you missed and help you build a strong link strategy to gain organic traffic to your site that enables you to rank better on the search result.
It is essential to compare the quantity and quality of backlinks with your competition to boost your rankings up and discover new golden opportunities for content.
Targeting keyword gaps
After you successfully list out the top keywords using SEMRush and other alternatives, you can easily find out what keywords you’re missing out on or what keywords your competitors used the most to gain the best traffic by using the keyword gap strategy. Identifying keyword gaps helps you understand the competition’s keywords that bring in more traffic for them and not you.
This helps you set a goal to tweak the keywords to your advantage or find newer opportunities with keywords that you can use to rank up on the search. An efficient tool to execute this is Google Keyword Planner, and you can use this to target keywords that are easier to rank with.
Checking online reviews
An excellent step to take to outrank your top website competitor is to on to sites like Yelp, Facebook, or a simple search on Google to read reviews left by customers of your top website competitor on the services they offer. You can also look at their social media presence manually or with tracking tools.
Having an insight into your top competitor’s customer reviews often shows you their strengths and weaknesses. Negative reviews provide a better understanding of where they lack, and positive reviews help you understand where their strong suit is. You can use these key insights and understand what you can do better to outrank them.
Try competitor website analysis to your advantage today
Performing a competitor website analysis helps you assess strategies and gain information on what you need to improve, helping you succeed in your industry. Take the missed out opportunities and get your goals on track.
