How to do website competitive analysis for your own website?

Competition is important for any business to grow and is imperative for your business since it gives consolation that you’re getting clients on account of the nature of your items and services. With a rise in number of businesses, there is a notable increase in their competition as well.

With Digital market booming day by day, entrepreneurs are eager to get their presence and rankings on the top pages of the search engines. Irrespective of the size, every business competes with every business, on a digital platform. It is safe to say that companies like Amazon or AirBnB can become your competitors on search engines. Hence, a competitive analysis is a vital part of the planning and research phase for organizations to gain the top ranks.

Without knowing your rivals, it’s difficult to comprehend which of them is the greatest danger, how to defeat them, and where to focus on your efforts. The organizations that perform a competitive analysis and utilize it to build up a marketing technique have leverage over those in a similar market who neglect to do likewise. Doing a competitive analysis ain’t a wrong thing. It helps you:

• Get a clearer picture of your brand
• You learn from other brands
• Provides you with a starting point to build competitive strategies for your potential customers and markets
• Helps you find what customers are looking for

Most shoppers utilize the web to discover information about items, services, or organizations before settling on buying something. It is essential to have an online presence, and to be competitive online is equally important. This way, it’s critical to outflank your immediate rivals. But now, the big question is HOW? We let the formula out today.

Know Who’s Near You:

This is the essential step of the competitive analysis. Let’s admit it we have done it in our personal lives too – knowing what the other girl will wear for Prom night to become the Prom Queen, or what the other guy has read to secure the top rank in School. Identification of that girl or the guy is the first step in the competitive analysis. Each organization has those feared contenders they can’t stand, regardless of what you do they are continually utilizing your thoughts and taking your potential clients. So, depending on your target location and target customers, identify your top 10 competitors. You can do so by simply ‘Googling’ your business type, services or products. There are various online tools like Google Adwords, Alexa, Ahref, SEM Rush that compares the rankings of your business and companies concerning keywords.

Know the Traffic Trend:

Once you know your competitors, know their traffic trends and their behaviour through online tools. Here’s an example of comparing the traffic trends over six months with the help of Alexa’s Site Comparison tools.

Vtiger and SugarCRM are Customer relationship management websites and are competitive in nature when it comes to CRM. When you compare the traffic trends of both, you see that the traffic of SugarCRM is slightly more than Vtiger. It has remained consistently high during the interval of six months. So, this becomes a standard traffic achievement for SugarCRM and for Vtiger, it is a new goal to drive more traffic on their website.

Competitive analysis doesn’t just end here. In competition we need to know what competitors do to drive traffic differently.

Compare the Traffic Metrics:

Let’s assume that SugarCRM is targeting the US market and thus it’s ranking on search engine in the US is 26,891, as compared to its competitor Vtiger which is at 36,634. So, it tells you that SugarCRM is hands down more popular than Vtiger.

Alexa uses a combination of unique visitors and pageviews to measure the popularity in a targeted area.

Next point is, which of them is gaining new visitors everyday?

Analyze Monthly Unique Visitors:

This metric helps you get a better idea of the audience size of a site. It is an aspect to know the market share of any website and benchmarking it since it counts the unique visitors that monthly come to a website.

Here you can see that SugarCRM earns a greater number of unique visitors each month. And for the past 30 days, this leading Customer relationship management website got an estimated unique visitor of 81,778 while Vtiger earned about 35,902 visitors.

So, from this, we can conclude that SugarCRM is using a good strategy to gain a good traffic. But, from WHERE?

Check the Traffic Sources:

Knowing how your targeted customers discover you (where they originate from) encourages you know where to center your endeavors. It additionally encourages you recognize effective techniques that are working for your rivals.

You’ll see that the lion’s share of traffic for both SugarCRM and Vtiger is coming from Search. So, this means that they are using effective SEO techniques to drive and gain huge traffic & potential leads from search engines.

The second most is the direct share. Since these are CRM websites, we can assume that a large number of people and business owners have it bookmarked for day-to-day jobs.

However, there is one peculiar difference between the traffic sources of both. SugarCRM is slowly getting a good portion of traffic through Social sources too, which tells you that they are also focused on Social medias, posting and engaging customers through social platforms as well.

Now that you know their traffic trends, its rank, monthly unique visitors and traffic sources, it is also important to visit their websites and do the following things to complete the competitor analysis process.

Kickstart with analysis of content:

Content is the king, hands down! After you have identified the competitor, dig in a little to analyze the content. Check out what kinds of content are published by them. It is not limited to just blog posting, it has various contents, for example:

• eJournals
• Videos
• Webinars
• Slides/Presentations
• Case studies
• FAQs
• Press releases
• Guest Posting Podcasts

Compare these contents with your website, check out when do they post their blogs, add things or update along with what topics they choose to write on. This will give you a better insight into what you do and what you haven’t done yet.

Know their SEO structure:

You and your competitors have the same kind of contents on the websites, but yet they are ahead. What is it that they do differently? SEO.

You know it how vital SEO is when you publish a blog or an article. When you check the content on your competitor’s website, also analyze its SEO structure. Know what types of keywords they use and how they use their keywords in the page title, H1 Tags, URLs, contents, Internal linking, Image ALT text. Do a keyword gap analysis and backlink gap analysis to improve the rankings of the website. Online tools like SEM rush can help you with it.

In this digitalized world, your competition is just a click away; you can’t avoid what your rivals are doing. The digital marketing system keeps changing all the time so competitor analysis should be consistently performed to guarantee you don’t get left behind. Who wants to be left out? Atlas SoftWeb has a team of skilled Digital marketers to handle all this for you and keep you ahead of your competitors! Let’s partner and encounter success.