Why a Competitor Analysis is Important?

What should you do if your competitor’s page ranks higher than yours? It basically comes down to this, if you rank higher than your competitors you’re a step ahead of them – irrelevant of how much higher you rank to be honest. A competitor analysis will allow you to see why your competitors are doing worse or better than you are and will give you a much needed wake up call.

You can’t properly compete if you are oblivious to what your competition is doing. You’ll either have no confidence at all or you’ll wrongfully have too much. You need to weigh yourself up against your competitors to fully comprehend what you need to do to stand out above them.

Compare Yourself

The following elements of your competitor’s business should all be carefully studied and compared to your own. This will give you a good indication of your strengths and weaknesses.

First you need to make a list of your competitors, of which there are two kinds:

1)      Direct competitors are companies that are very similar to your company and that your clients could easily be clients of.

2)      There are also companies that are pretty much identical to yours, but they’re geographically placed as to not be competition (except if you are a global company).

The elements to focus on and questions to ask are:

• Website:

- What is the first glance impression?
- What is the overall user experience?
- Is navigation clear and logical?
- Consider the depth of the site. Is it very shallow or does it include relevant content?
- What is the interactivity on the site like? Is there an active news feed?
- Study the support section of the website. How comprehensive is it?

• Microsites:

- Does the company have any product specific microsites?

• Blog and/or blogs:

- Overall professionalism is very important.
- How often do they publish?
- Consider the quality of the information as well as the actual writing.
- Are social media sharing tools abundant and easily recognisable?
- Are clear call-to-actions incorporated on all pages?
*A cornerstone of content marketing is using content to attract readers and then convert them to leads.
- Do these call-to-actions open in well designed and user friendly landing pages?

• Social Media:

- How many social media accounts does the company have?
- How many Twitter accounts do they have?
- How many followers do they have?
- Look at the quality of their tweets as well as their followers. Are the followers spammy or would you also want them as followers?- - What is the activity like on all their platforms, i.e. what is the level of engagement?
- Are they active on YouTube? Online video is becoming an essential element of content marketing.
*According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index video will contribute to at least 86% of all Internet traffic in the next three years.
This means that if your competitors aren’t utilising video it could be an area in which you can make inroads.

• Overall Content Strategy:

- Is their content educational, entertaining or self-centered?

The Road Ahead

So what should you do with all this information? Simply put, it will give you an indication of the task ahead. Maybe you realise that your own content marketing strategy is so impressive that you have a new sense of achievement. In most cases, however, it will make you realise that you have a lot of work ahead of you.

It’s important to remember that you might have a good grasp of what your competitors are doing right now – but they can always change their strategy and you need to stay on top of it.

Sound Idea Digital is a complete digital marketing agency. For more information, contact 012 66 44 227 or email to info@soundidea.co.za

Carina Claassens is a Writer for Sound Idea Digital | carina@soundidea.co.za | @soundidea | www.soundidea.co.za

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