Your business growth relies on your ability to dominate your competition and claim the top seat in your area’s presence.
Besides providing right services to your customers, there are a number of things you need to do for you business to boost. You need to dig down a little extra and figure out what other people in your industry are doing to attract customers.
Online competitor research, amongst other things, will help you tune your digital marketing strategies better and hence help you grow your business faster. Whether you have just started your digital marketing business or you have been in it for quite some time, you still need to be aware and familiar with your competitors’ online presence.
The following tips will help you understand about what other people are doing to strengthen their growth and visibility and therefore, provide you with options to do something even better.
-> Identify your SEO competitors-
An SEO competitor is someone who holds significant rankings for keywords or search phrases related to your business. Competitive analysis is a key aspect when in the beginning stages of an SEO campaign. A lot of organizations skip this step and move forward to keyword optimization, mapping or link building. But understanding who our competitors are and seeing where they stand can lead to a far more comprehensive understanding of what our goals should be and reveal gaps or blind spots.
Compile a list of important search phrases relevant to your business, products and services. Then see who holds the ranks for these terms. If a search result ranks for multiple searches, then consider it as your competitor. However, not every buyer/customer will look for keywords or make a keyword search. Most of them use organic, natural language while searching for something. So plan your strategies accordingly.
-> Go beyond a Google Search and use Competitor Research Tools-
Undoubtedly, any research project these days begins with a simple Google search or visiting your competitor’s web page. But there are also a variety of tools either supplied by Google or that relate to Google’s search results that might give you interesting insight into your competition. These tools analyze your competition’s site, compare their rankings/standings to yours and even provide data pertaining to paid search.
There are many such tools available but the best ones are SEMrush, SpyFu, QuickSprout, SimilarWeb, Google Trends and Google Alerts, etc. There you have it. If you’re looking to build a successful organic traffic pipeline that consistently generates traffic, brand visibility and increased revenue, the competitor analysis tools will be useful. However, you should always put in consistent time and effort to grow your business.
-> Analyze their blog-
Blogging is a crucial component to any digital marketing strategy. Determine if your competitor’s blogs are only stuffed with keywords or not. Find out if it focuses on trending industry topics that strive to resolve consumer needs. Keep in mind that the content created to address common concerns in natural language not only ranks well, but converts too!
Blogs serve more purposes than just improving SEO. Good content will keep your customers engaged, interested and will hence help you convert them. It will create brand awareness and also make you stand out in the crowd. Find out opportunities in the shortcomings of your competitors and build your digital marketing strategies to align your visibility and online reputation.
-> Identify your social media customers-
Having an active presence in social media is very valuable because it generates valuable social signals to you website to improve SEO, allows easy access to targeted audiences, gives you ability to promote brand awareness, draws traffic to your blog, etc. Understanding who your social media competitors are is paramount to hitting your growth goals through a well thought-out digital marketing agency.
It is important to figure out how often your competition posts content and how they engage with their customers on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. While observing the competitor’s social media, pay attention to the type of messages and articles that people like and don’t like. Figure out the times of day when people engage the most with you competitors and when they are less active.
Whether you want to admit it or not, they’re out there and they’re hungry for your customers. While it might seem unfair given everything else you need to keep on top of in building up your business, you might want to consider devoting the time and energy into keeping tabs on your competition. Executing a comprehensive competitor analysis mission will give you data and insight into improving multiple facets of your digital marketing strategy.
