How a Competitor Analysis Can Help you Grow your Business from Day One

A competitor analysis might be one of the most powerful ways to grow your business from day one.

The reason behind this is that you can easily learn from what is already working for them.

Normally, in order to implement new strategies, you will need to study your business analytics to understand what is working and what is not.

With a competitor analysis, you can use their data to your advantage; You can find which products and services are working, what kind of leads they use to convert readers, which social networks are the most used by their target market, and much more.

Learning all of this will take your business closer to the path of success.

So in this post, I am going to show you how to do this step by step.

Let’s dive in!

But first, What is a competitive analysis?

A competitive analysis is a strategy in which you first identify your top competitors and then research the techniques they use to market their services or products.

It will not only help you better understand what works for them, but you can also take these strategies a step further and improve them to create a solid strategy that works for your business.

How to perform a competitor’s analysis?

I am going to show you how you can grow your business with the IRAIM technique.

Identify your top competitors.

The first step towards your competitor’s analysis is to find your top competitors.

To do that, you need to differentiate between direct and indirect competitors:

• Direct competitors: are companies that offer the same kind of product or service as your business.
• Indirect competitors: are companies that offer a different kind of product or service but could satisfy the same customer needs.

In this case, we need to take a closer look at direct competitors only.

You might already know who your top competitors are. But if you don’t, the easiest way to find out your competitors is by searching on Google.

Some ways you can look for are:

• Products you want to sell i.e. “black sunglasses”
• Services you want to sell i.e. “How to create an online course”
• Related keywords. For example, if you provide SEO services, related keywords could be “keyword research tools”, “Off-page SEO”, etc.

Then take a close look at the top results. Click on each of them to make sure they relate to your search. They are likely to be your top competitors.

Research your competitor’s top-performing content.

Once you have identified your top competitors from the previous step is time to research their top-performing content.

The objective here is to find out which exact topic their readers are interested in.

In order to do that, we are going to use Ubbersuggest.

First, go to Ubbersuggest.

Then type your competitor’s website and hit search

On the left menu, click over “Top pages”

That will show you the top traffic pages for that website.

These are the pages their readers/ customers are most interested in.

Meaning these are topics you should probably cover.

In the next section, we are going to analyze these pages in detail.

Analyze your competitor’s top-performing pages.

Now we have identified the top-performing pages from the previous step, let’s take a closer look.

Being these the top pages of a business, probably they are optimized for traffic retention, conversions (leads), and selling a product or service.

So they would be the perfect place to start your competitor analysis. Ideally, you should follow these steps for the top 3 or 5 pages to understand better the pattern.

First, let’s start with the word count. Normally long-form content (over 2000 words) performs better in terms of SEO. It also means a topic is cover in-depth, so people might be more interested.

Head to this word counter and enter the target page URL.

You will then see the word count and give you a good idea about the extension of these pages. You will also find some of the keywords used.

Then, scan the whole page and look for things like:

• What is the main topic (keyword)?
• What kind of lead magnet they use to convert readers into subscribers. What do they offer with the lead magnet and where it is placed within the page?
• What kind of article is it? Is it a product/service review, a case study, informative, etc?

Lastly, repeat this process with the top pages for each competitor and write down your findings.

Then you can use that to your advantage when you create content for your website.

Identify your competitor’s main sources of website traffic.

When it comes to online business, having traffic to your site is key to success.

Now, there are different ways to get traffic to a website; Some businesses have a solid SEO strategy to drive organic traffic mainly, some others might focus their efforts on social media or advertising.

In any case, there is an easy way you can find out their traffic sources: SimilarWebSimply head to SimiliarWeb, type the URL of your competitor’s website, and hit enter.

Then scroll down to traffic sources and you will see them.

And not only that, if you can keep scrolling down you will find very interesting information like:

• Top referring sites
• Top 5 organic keywords
• Top 5 paid keywords
• And which social platform is driving the more traffic

These can be very helpful analytics to help you with your content strategy.

You can also find out the social media network which drives most of the traffic so you can focus your efforts on that one. This will be very helpful in the next section.

Lastly, you can use Buzzsumo to discover the most shared posts within the last year:

Monitor your competitor’s social media activity.

With the help of the previous step, now you should be able to see which social media works best for your competitors.

The next step would be to check out how they manage these social networks.

The goal is to find out how your competitors engage with their audience and how they market their products/services.

Some of the factors you should pay attention to are:

• The number of followers: In some social networks, you do need a lot of followers to send some traffic. But there are some in which you can generate good traffic without many followers. Check the numbers and plan your strategy accordingly.
• Posting frequency: Consistency is normally key to success in any social network. Study how many times a day they post in their top-performing social network to get an idea of the kind of work you would need to do to get similar results.
• Kind of content they promote. Do they normally share blog posts? infographics? do they also promote content from other blogs? You need to understand which kind of content performs better by checking comments, likes, and shares. That will give you a good indication of the kind of things the audience likes.

Are you ready to use the IRAIM technique to grow your business?

Learning from your competitor’s analysis is just the first step towards your business growth.

Now you need to understand how you can fit all this knowledge into your business.

It does not mean that if you do exactly what your competitors do you will succeed.

These are powerful techniques to guide you. It is your job now to adapt these techniques to your business and to your customer’s needs for better results.

Complementary, you can use these 10 niche marketing strategies to grow your business.

Author Info

Sergio Sigler is the founder of The Niche Guru. After creating niche websites from scratch for clients, he created The Niche Guru to help people finding blog niche ideas and turn them into profitable businesses.