To know how to get ahead of your competitors, you need to have a good knowledge of them. To help yourself progress, you can begin by doing some competitive analysis. A good starting point would be research and learn from the competition, see what works well and what doesn’t.
What is competitive marketing analysis?
Competitive analysis is a marketing strategy used by all businesses, not just content marketers use to gather deeper understanding of who your competitors are. When assessing their business or blog, look for the following
- In what aspects do they succeed/fail?
- What marketing channels do they use?
- What does their content strategy look like?
- What currently makes them better than you?
- Do they have any different opportunities than you?
How do break this down?
Let’s start to break this down and see how to successfully complete your competitive analysis.
Step 1: Identifying your competitors
You can do a quick google into your industry and see which brands/business come up in the search engine results. You may already have knowledge into these but you can then identify them into the following categories:
Direct – competitors offering the same product/services as you For example, if you run a travel blog, your direct competitors would be other travel blogs or leading websites like TripAdvisor.
Indirect – competitors offering similar products/services to the same target market. For example, your travel blog’s indirect competitors could be food or lifestyle bloggers who also share about their personal travels.
Substitutes – competitors that offer something users can choose over your product/services. For example, users can choose to use Lonely Planet guide books or YouTube videos over reading your blog.
Step 2: Identifying their strengths and weaknesses
Identifying strengths and weakness is a great way to analyse where you can be better and change aspects of your blog. Using a SWOT analysis tool is a popular and easy method used to analyse and present your findings. SWOT stands for, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and provides a good framework to define particular aspects to develop in your strategic planning. Doing this on your own blog as well as your competitors
Step 3: How to make the most of your analysis?
When doing your SWOT analysis, try to compare things like:
- How often are posts made?
- How good is the quality of the content?
- The length of the content?
- How high do the blogs rank on Google?
- Does the site take a long time to load?
- Is the blog accessible from mobiles?
- Do the blog posts have many shares?
From our own analysis, we have found that the best tools to use are:
- SEMRush
- Neil Patel’s SEO Organiser
- Ahrefs
Using these tools will help to find the best words to include within in your own content, and also look at what is working well in more popular competitors posts. When search for SEO and content marketing, some provide useful information like traffic rankings, SEO scores, domain authorities, backlink information and amount of shares. You can decide which works best for you!!
