Competitors analysis is one crucial process for every business. When it comes to online business, do you have an idea how do you monitor your competitor’s actions and try to make it one step in front of them?
You should have some ideas when it comes to monitoring your competitors in offline, here’s some tools and methods to help you monitor your competitors’ online traffic, which in fact can help you to plan ahead of them.
1. Identify Your Competitors
Before you can analyze someone, you must know who are them. Identify competitors of your business by performing a search in Google. Use keywords related to your industry and keywords that people will search to find businesses similar to yours. Your biggest competitor in offline may not be your strongest competitor in online, as even some smaller firms perform better in terms of SEO as compared to bigger size firms.
Perform search with your selected keywords and save down the website URLs of your potential competitors. The websites that appear in the first 2 search result pages are your biggest threat, as searchers normally won’t go pass the third page.
Jot them down and save it in a notepad, you will need to use them for analysis later.
2. Visit Their Websites
In online business, your website is the most important element that can affect the purchase decision of a buyer. So, you want to make sure yours have the most convincing copy and highest conversion rate.
Visit all your competitors’ websites that you have saved down in Step 1, and observe whatever they have in their website. Analyze their copy, graphics, images, call-to-action, web design layout, loading speed and user experience.
Try to get your friends or someone who is not familiar with this industry to help you too. In this way you can get a less bias opinion and insights. If you find a website which is able to make you have an urge to buy from them, learn from them and improve on your own website.
Gather the strengths and weaknesses from these websites so that you can cross out the mistakes you have on your website and further enhance on your strengths.
3. Follow Their Social Media Pages
Some businesses are very active in social media such as Facebook and Twitter. These are the places where you can gather the latest updates, news and promotions from your competitor. Follow their social media pages so you can know what’s their latest happenings and what kind of promotions that they are planning to do, so you can do a counter offer that is better than them.
Also check out their users’ reviews to see what makes their customers so satisfy with their service or product, so you can learn more about your industry consumer’s behavior.
You can use tools like Klout and SumAll to see how’s your social media postings are performing, and then gauge it against your competitors.
4. Subscribe to Their Newsletters
Newsletter is one of the most favourite tools that used by business to send new promotions or announcements regarding their business to their customers or leads. Go to your competitors’ websites and subscribe to their newsletter if they have it.
You will constantly receive newsletter from your competitors so that you can keep yourself updated with their latest doings, without needing to manually visit their website or social media page from time to time.
Also take the opportunity to learn a thing or two from their newsletter design.
5. Monitor Their Visitors’ Traffic
If only you could access to your competitor’s Google Analytic…well that is not going to happen.
However, you can use some tools like SimilarWeb and Ahrefs to see what is your competitors’ website traffic as well as where they get those traffic.
SimilarWeb and Ahrefs provide free website analysis but only with limited data, if you need more data out from your competitors, you will need to subscribe to their service, which isn’t cheap. We’ll leave the purchase decision to you.
Other than ‘winning’ your competitors, make sure you keep improving your own business and keep your customers’ happy. In the end of the day, customers are the most important people in your business.
Sanz Teoh
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