5 Tips for Performing Competitive Analysis
It is important to do a competitive analysis on a regular basis to see how your business compares to your competitors and how you can improve your marketing and products. There are steps you can take and software you can use to create a system for this. Here are some tips.
1. Find Your Top 10 Competitors
One way you can find your top competitors is by doing Google searches for products and services you offer. If you sell products online, you can also do searches on sites such as Amazon.com to see who is selling a similar product. You can also use tools such as SEM Rush to see how other companies rank for your keywords.
2. Examine Competitor SEO
Your competitor’s SEO may be the thing that helps them stand out from the competition. Is your competitor using keywords in areas such as: H1 tags, page title, content, internal links, image alt text, and URLs? Also, what type of keywords do your competitors use? Specific keywords are usually long tail keywords that have lower search volume than general keywords. For example, “Halloween Costumes” is a general keyword. “Dorothy Dress Halloween Costume” is more specific. Looking at the keywords used by your competition can also give you ideas for new keywords to use.
3. Examine Competitor Content
By examining the content that your competition publishes, you can identify the things that are working well for them and find ways that you can do even better. For example, you can use Facebook Insights to find your competitor’s best performing posts. You can identify the type of content that your competitor focuses on such as blog posts, e-books, and videos. Also note how often they are publishing and the quality of their work. What are they doing well that you should be doing?
4. Analyze Competitor Social Media
Social media allows companies to share their content and have interactions with followers and customers. So it is important to analyze how your competition uses social media in their marketing. How often do they post and what type of content do they post? Do they have professional looking profile graphics and calls to action?
5. Organize the Data and Create a Plan
Once you have gathered all the data about each competitor and put it into a spreadsheet, you can then compare them and find similarities and differences. You can also identify key areas where you can improve and create a plan for implementation.