Understanding The Competition

In the digital world, you can break your competitors down in a couple of different ways. There might be other businesses that do what you do, where customers have options to shop around on service level, price and so on. 

And then there's keywords - where your traditional competitors may not even feature, and where you're essentially competing with each other for a place on Google's coveted first page. 

Why Should You Care About Your Competitors' Performance?

While focusing on your own marketing strategies is essential, keeping an eye on your competitors can offer valuable insights for several reasons:

1. Setting Realistic Goals: By analysing your competitors' performance, you gain a clearer understanding of what is achievable in your industry. It helps you set more realistic goals and strive for meaningful growth.

2. Spotting Untapped Opportunities: Competitor analysis might reveal under-served markets or audience segments that your competitors haven't fully explored. Exploiting these elements can give you greater market share and expand your digital reach in the process. 

3. Learning from Successful Strategies: Competitors who excel in certain areas can teach you valuable lessons. Studying their successes can inspire improvements in your own approach. There's no harm in activating a 'swipe and deploy' strategy if you can see something is working well for someone else..! 

Best Practices for Checking Your Competitors' Performance

There are few different methods and tools that we use here to gauge competitor performance. 

1. Keyword Analysis: Keywords are the building blocks of successful SEO. Tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs can reveal the keywords your competitors are targeting, giving you insights into their content and focus.

2. Ad Intelligence Tools: To understand your competitors' Google Ad strategies, use tools like AdBeat or SpyFu. These tools provide information on their ad copy, placements, and budget, allowing you to refine your own ad campaigns.

3. Backlink Research: SEO Spyglass and similar tools enable you to discover the websites that link to your competitors. This information can help you build your own backlink strategy.

4. Social Media Analysis: Following your competitors on social media can provide a glimpse into their content strategy and audience engagement. This knowledge can inspire your own social media campaigns. You can see what types of posts are working best of driving the most engagement and try something similar for yourself! 

Ethical Considerations

It's also important, as with anything, to go about things the right way and make sure there are no potentially awkward conversations waiting for you around the corner..! 

1. Respect Publicly Available Data: Ensure that the data you gather is publicly accessible and doesn't involve any unauthorised access to private information.

2. Learn, Don't Copy: I mentioned 'swipe and deploy above' but the goal is not to replicate your competitors' strategies verbatim. Instead, try and take some inspiration from their success and apply it creatively to your brand.

3. Embrace Your Unique Identity: While competitor analysis can be illuminating, remember that your brand has its own unique value to offer. Stay true to your identity and values wherever you can. 

As ever, I hope that's useful and here's something I'd like to offer you as a little treat  - we're always offering free website audits here as you've probably seen by now - however we can also offer broad audits of literally any website at all, in terms of which keywords they're ranking for on Google. 

So if you've ever wondered how a competitor website is performing, contact us today, let us know their URL and we'll send a report back within the next 24 hours! 

Want to dive a bit deeper into the whole process? 

Book a call with me here!