When brand loyalty is as fleeting as a trending hashtag, success hinges on understanding your competition. A methodical competitive analysis helps you forge your own path. So, how do you go about this?
- Spot the conversion funnels: Can you spot the sales funnels on your competitor’s website? Reviewing how they are set up, what carrots are used to encourage customers along the journey, and analyzing other factors such as what imagery or copy they use can provide insight to help you build similar processes. Key clues to look for include identifying the calls to action and look for evidence of a breadcrumb trail-style interface.
- SEO: While you’re on your competitor’s websites, look at how their pages are built and review their SEO efforts. What keywords are they sprinkling throughout their pages? Do they feature prominently in titles or subtitles? Have they made any effort to make the website more accessible to seeing or hearing-impaired visitors? Tools such as BrightEdge can also help analyze websites and can save you a great deal of time here.
- Keyword analysis: What keywords do your competitors have locked down? Tools such as BrightEdge can help you uncover these, and, even better, will provide recommendations for improving your own search engine attractiveness. For free alternatives, enter important keywords into a search engine and see where your competitor ranks. Then, analyze their web site to understand how they’ve configured their SEO.
- Uncover backlinks: Backlinks are external links that point from one website to another. Search engines reward pages that have a lot of backlinks pointing to them with better search positioning because it implies authority. Understanding what sites are linking to your competitor’s website can help you adjust your own strategy. To find backlinks, use tools such as SE Ranking’s Backlink Checker.
- Platform Playgrounds: Evaluate your rival’s social presence. Do any of their accounts stand out as being stronger than others? Ask yourself why. Evaluate how engaged their audience is and what content they respond most effectively to. Note how often your competitors post and if they are using advertising. Then use this information to inform how your target audience will react to your own content. Just don’t base your entire strategy on what others are doing, particularly since they may be failing spectacularly in the background.
- Content quality: Analyze their content. Are they publishing educational material? Providing glimpses into how they work? Deconstruct their content strategy and tone with a spreadsheet that breaks down types of posts (text only, image post, video) and tone (formal, informal, humorous) and take note of what combination elicits the most engagement.
- Campaign mapping: Don’t just look at what they’re posting today–go back, at least one full year. Have they worked with influencers, hosted contests? Were these efforts successful, and if so, can you replicate them?
- Community interaction: What amount of engagement are your competitors’ posts receiving, and what level of quality is it? For example, a post that may seem incredibly successful with dozens of comments and hundreds of Likes may have achieved that by being boosted through paid means, turning an organic post into a sponsored post. Bots often pick up on these types of posts by spamming low-quality comments such as “thanks for sharing” or “I'd like to learn more.” Of the interactions that appear genuine, look to the social post and attempt to determine what made it successful. Was it capitalizing on a trending topic? Did it post something particularly heartfelt or humorous?
Keep in mind as you conduct your analysis that you should not be copying your rivals–what they are doing could very well be ineffective. To maximize your insights, evaluate multiple competitors and compare metrics. This will provide insight and knowledge which you can use to improve your own brand’s digital presence.
