How to Conduct an Online Competitor Analysis
Keeping a pulse on the competition’s performance with an online competitor analysis is essential to an effective digital strategy. Most everything in the online space is relative. If your competitors rank higher in search engine results than your company, you will not generate as much traffic even if your products and services are better. With one-third of the traffic going to the no. 1 ranked website on Google search results, you can’t afford to let your competition beat you.
How to Conduct an Online Competitor Analysis for Business Advantage
At Walker Sands, we prepare comprehensive competitor analyses that help you understand key insights and opportunities to give you a competitive edge. There are several steps we take to conduct an online competitor analysis that uncovers improvement areas, performance gaps and an overall performance snapshot in your digital presence and SEO results:
- Identify Competitive Key Phrases: At the beginning of the analysis, we create an all-encompassing list of the keywords and key phrases you rank for versus your competition. This helps us determine new keyword phrases you should be targeting and which keywords you perform better than your competition. Together, we work to determine the most worthwhile keywords to go after based on your audiences and business goals.
- Reverse Engineer High-Ranking Competitors: For the keywords that your competitors rank higher than you, we work backwards to determine the most appropriate next steps to improve your search visibility. It may be that your competitor ranks no. 1 for a specific keyword because it has 25 high-quality pieces of content dedicated to that topic and a digital partnership that enables them to generate strong inbound links. Sometimes, we find out that a competitor is using black-hat tactics to rank higher in search results, which are frowned upon by Google. In these cases, we report our findings to Google and continue to focus on white-hat practices that generate sustainable, long-term results.
- Offer Actionable Recommendations: As a result of the in-depth online competitor analysis, we offer actionable recommendations for elevating your rankings in search engines in a step-by-step, easy-to-digest format. This includes a comprehensive content strategy and keyword targeting priorities. We don’t just give you recommendations for organic search. We provide paid search insights as well by assessing the value of your competitors’ key phrases. If your competition ranks highly for an important term that you should target as well, we can help you execute cost-effective pay-per-click campaigns to ensure you immediately show up when a user searches that phrase. We can do this while simultaneously building your organic search campaigns over the long term.
Conducting a full-scale online competitor analysis can be daunting and time consuming. Let our SEO experts do the work for you and deliver our insights in an in-depth, yet easy-to-understand format. Armed with a better understanding of your competitors’ digital performance, you can significantly improve your results and capture more market share. Fill out the form or call us today at (312) 267-0066 to learn more about our competitive analyses and digital audits.