Are you analysing your competitor's Business and Website?

How to Analyse Your SEO Competitors?

Competitor research is conducting an analysis of your competitors' actual businesses and websites. It’s important to gain an intricate knowledge of the products that your competitors offer and an understanding of how they market their business online.

There are three core areas to pay attention to when evaluating a competitor’s website:

1.  User experience

2.  Social media

3.  Content strategy

We will now go through each of these areas and analyse what to look out for.

Analysis of User Experience

At this point you should try to browse the website as a normal user and make notes as you go. Even better, if you can get a friend to browse the website and tell you what they like and dislike you will gain a lot of great insights from a neutral perspective.

Ask yourself these questions as you go through your competitors' websites:

• How do they convert visitors into customers?
• What is their shopping cart process like?
• What signals of trust are there?

• How visually engaging is the website?
• How easy it is to find your way to product/service pages?
• Are they running any special promotions or deals?

Analysis of Social Media

Next we need to look at how your competitors are engaging with their customers through their use of social media. There can be a lot to learn from this, but it can be quite hard to replicate. A good community and customer base don’t happen overnight. Thus, you need to learn all you can from your competitor, but then translate it into what you can actually accomplish with the resources at your disposal.

The key question you need to answer here is:

How are they engaging with customers?

To answer this, go through their website and answer these questions:

• Do they have social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+ linked to from their website?
• Are they actively speaking to their users on these platforms? What are they saying? How are they handling negative feedback?
• What content do they promote on their social platforms? Is it just their own or other websites as well?
• Is their content being shared socially?  Are they shared on Twitter, Facebook Google+.

Analysis of Content Strategy

This is a very important step and you can learn a great deal about how much your competitors are investing online by looking at the content they produce. Good quality content has the power to attract links and traffic to your website; and it can also help increase stickiness and user engagement.

When you go through your competitor’s website, keep in mind the following questions:

•       Does the site have user-generated content, such as from product reviews?
•       Does the site have a blog? If so, what type of content is on the blog?
•       Does it have an active community engaging with the blog? On average, how many social shares or comments does the blog generate and what type of content was the most popular?
•       What type of content/resources does the site have on the page? Types of resources include:
  •         White Papers
  •         FAQs
  •         News
  •         Guides
  •         Infographics
  •         Widgets
  •         Forum
  •         Informational videos

We hope you found this page useful. We look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Article written by

Prash Nair