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How to identify, analyse and benchmark against your competitors

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CONTENTS

  • Chapter 1 Introduction
  • Chapter 2 Identifying your Competitors
  • Chapter 3 Competitor Onsite Analysis
  • Chapter 4 Competitor Content Analysis
  • Chapter 5 Outreach; Creating a List of Prospects from Competitor Analysis
  • Chapter 6 Competitor Social Media Analysis
  • Chapter 7 Ongoing/Active Competitor Monitoring
  • Chapter 8 Conclusion
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Chapter 1INTRODUCTION

So, you're looking to outshine the competition but you're a little stumped on where to start with assessing their efforts.

From spotting what's worked - or hasn't - for competitors, to identifying gaps in the market; a comprehensive analysis helps shape a robust strategy that could set you miles above the rest.
It can seem a daunting, lengthy and complicated task (we thought so anyway); which is why we're here to help.

Our step-by-step guide walks you through competitor identification, site analysis and how to scrutinise the campaigns and social channels of your competition.

We'll equip you with the information, resources and tools you need to complete a thorough analysis from start to finish; or you can easily navigate chapters to focus on the bits most important to you. Let the analysis commence!

Chapter 2IDENTIFYING YOUR COMPETITORS

The first - and most important step - to completing your analysis is identifying your competitors.

Obvious, we know, but it can be harder than you think.

Put simply: a competitor is a brand offering similar products or services to a similar audience or purchaser.

To add a sprinkle of complication, competitors can fit into categories; three of which we have highlighted below.

Direct

Jessops and Kodak are prime examples; offering close to identical products and services.

You'll probably already have a clear idea of your competitors within this category.

Indirect

Samsung is an indirect competitor of Jessops. They offer the same products – digital cameras - therefore compete for the same customers, however, Samsung also specialise in other products outside of this category.

Another example would be Currys or Argos; an indirect competitor of Jessops as they sell digital cameras, amongst other goods.

Indirect competitors can be revealed through keyword analysis; identifying those appearing on terms you aim to rank for. We recommend this walkthrough to keyword research by SEONICK to take you through the keyword process.

Replacement/Perceived

Although the term varies by speaker, the consensus is these competitors are the trickiest to identify.

These are competitors who may not offer an identical product or belong to the same industry, but compete for the equivalent resources a customer might need to enjoy your product. For example, mobile phone companies might compete with Jessops, as smart phones feature increasingly good cameras, eliminating the need for a separate gadget.

Audience research is the best way to identify these types; try social listening tools, like Hootsuite or Social Studio, to see what fans are talking about and detect topics that might lead to competition.

Customer surveys – using platforms like Google Consumer Surveys – are useful too. Furthermore, you can gain insight into your audience’s interests by checking out their affinity groups on Google Analytics.

Choosing Realistic Competitors

If you’re a start-up, eradicate ambitions to compete with huge, established brands for rankings on popular keywords. Don’t, however, discard them from content analysis, as you may find gaps in their content, or an existing campaign might spark a brilliant idea for you.

Similarly, if you operate offline, high street counterparts may not be competing with you online to the same degree. Consider this when deciding whether to incorporate them into your online analysis.

The most important thing to remember is not to fuss over hundreds of competitors:

  • 1Start by identifying known, direct and offline competitors from existing knowledge.
  • 2Find indirect competitors via keyword research.
  • 3Locate perceived competitors via audience research.
  • 4Narrow your list down to between three and five brands by using a site, like Searchmetrics, to investigate their visibility. Any sites with a persistently low trend aren’t worth pursuing.

Happy with your list? Then let's move on to onsite analysis.

Chapter 3COMPETITOR ONSITE ANALYSIS

Onsite analysis reveals your competitor's strengths and weaknesses; allowing you to determine what to incorporate – and avoid – in your own strategy.

The graphic below – the content of which has been influenced by research and findings from Backlinko's on-page SEO infographic – outlines 12 questions to ask when scrutinising a competitor's site.

1Does the title begin with a keyword?

A Moz study found pages beginning titles with a keyword ranked above those with a keyword at the middle or end.

2Are they using SEO-friendly URLs?

These are, affectively, short and 'pretty;' avoiding sporadic combinations of letters and numbers for IDs and parameters (e.g. accuranker.com/243-pa?) and following a practical structure.

3Do keywords appear soon within content?

Including a keyword within the first half of an article reiterates the content's focus, helping with rankings.

4Do titles include modifiers?

Modifiers, like '2015,' 'guide,' or 'review,' help brands rank for long tail target keywords; are your competitors using them?

5Are page titles wrapped in H1 tags?

H1’s are headline tags. While some platforms, like Wordpress, add these automatically, others override this setting.

To check if your competitor’s have labelled titles correctly, hit Ctrl+U on a PC, or Option+Command+U on a Mac, to access the site’s source code. Then, see if their page titles are wrapped in H1 tags.

6Does the page include multi-media content?

Text can only go so far in aiding SEO; visitors need to be engaged with images, videos and graphics to reduce bounce rate and increase time on page – both of which are ranking factors for Google.

7How long (and relevant) is their content?

SERPIQ.com's industry study determined longer content ranked much higher in Google.

Clearly, length is relative to the topic covered, so when analysing scan the content to see how informative and relevant it is to the page’s topic.

8How engaging is the site?

A page's quality is partly determined by bounce rate and the average visit time – so it must be engaging.

Are your competitors writing engaging copy and using a clear site design? Is their site optimised for mobile? These features all help improve time on page.

9How's their load speed?

Google have said site speed is an important ranking signal.

MunchWeb's study showed 75% of user's wouldn't revisit a site with a load time of longer than four seconds.

10Are they using LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords?

These are keywords related to the core keyword the page is optimised for.

Free tool, lsigraph, suggests related keywords for a phrase. Type in the competitor’s core keyword, check out the suggested phrases and see if they are featuring throughout the content.

11Do internal links feature on the site?

Internal links (to relevant pages) help crawlers find relevant pages and pass 'link juice' through your site, helping pages to rank.

12Does the site feature social sharing buttons?

Search engine algorithms are increasingly incorporating social signals.

BrightEdge found clear share buttons increased sharing by up to 700%, ultimately improving a page’s rankings.

Ready to tackle an onsite competitor analysis? Download our free template here to get started.

DOWNLOAD COMPETITOR CONTENT ANALYSIS CHECKLIST freebie

Chapter 4COMPETITOR CONTENT ANALYSIS

Scrutinising competitor content is beneficial for a whole host of reasons, including:

  • Spotting opportunities for quick wins.
  • Identifying what hasn't worked for them and should be avoided.
  • Highlighting gaps in the market you can position yourself as an expert in.
  • Detecting topics competitors are already considered experts in and are therefore best sidestepped.

When analysing their content, ensure you include pieces of all levels; from large scale interactive campaigns, to blog posts.

The hero, hub and hygiene concept – coined by YouTube within their playbook – applies nicely to content and provides a useful definition of the types.

Hero

Day-to-day content produced to appeal to your target audience and keep them engaged, e.g. blog posts.

Hub

Regularly pushed, but slightly larger, content pieces aimed to educate or entertain your demographic, like guides or 'how-tos.'

Hygiene

Large scale content pieces, used to raise brand awareness and bring in new leads, including Infographics or interactive pieces targeted at a wider audience.

Useful Tools

The thought of manually trawling blog posts, infographics, guides, etc. to identify your rivals' strongest – and weakest – content is exhausting. Fortunately, these tools will help shave valuable hours off the process.

Buzzsumo allows you to identify the most shared content across social, locate influencers and receive content alerts.

Additionally, by inputting your competitor’s URL, you can identify their most socially shared articles, ordered by popularity.

Ahrefs not only helps you find newest links to any piece of content, but also recently launched a Content Explorer which allows you to find most shared content across multiple networks.

We find it complements BuzzSumo very well in research stages.

Now that you have a list of the most shared and linked to pieces of hygiene, hub and hero content, you need to note strengths and weaknesses.

When analysing a competitor's best performing pieces in more depth, consider the following questions:

  • What type of content is it?
  • What is the purpose of this content? (E.g. Brand awareness, leads, visits).
  • How shareable is it?
  • Is it gated? (I.e. Do users have to enter an email address/other info to access it?)

Download our checklist of the above to help structure your competitor content analysis.

DOWNLOAD COMPETITOR CONTENT ANALYSIS CHECKLIST freebie

Chapter 5OUTREACH; CREATING A LIST OF PROSPECTS FROM COMPETITOR ANALYSIS

As you start creating content of your own, you can begin building a prospect list using the information gleaned above, and scrutinising their backlinks.

This tool allows you to analyse backlinks of a specific URL (i.e. piece of content).

  • Find a piece of competitor content similar – whether in format or topic – to the piece you're working on.
  • Locate the campaign's URL and input it into Majestic, where you’ll be served a list of sites linking to it.
  • Identify some of the stronger sites and add them to a prospecting list. If they’ve been interested in something similar, what's to say they won't be again?

Once you’ve built up a list of target sites, you can study their social following.

By entering your competitor's URL, you can locate the most influential Twitter users sharing your competitor's content.

This tool can be used to identify followers that are actively engaged with your competitors on Twitter.

Combine these findings to create a target list for paid social activity, as well as potential prospects to outreach to when promoting your content.

Chapter 6COMPETITOR SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYSIS

When benchmarking against your competitors, analysing their social channels will prove insightful; allowing you to confirm their strongest - and weakest – points.

Determine which channels they're active on, then scrutinise their pages, considering the below:

  • How big is their following?
  • How engaged are their following?
  • Are they doing any paid activity?
  • How regularly are they posting?
  • What topics are they posting about and which do better than others?
  • Do they share content from their site?
  • Do their social channels rank on their brand terms?

Use our template to log progress for each of their channels.

DOWNLOAD COMPETITOR CONTENT ANALYSIS CHECKLIST freebie

Consider their strengths and weaknesses and turn them into tips and quick wins that can be implemented into your own social strategy.

Chapter 7ONGOING/ACTIVE COMPETITOR MONITORING

So, you've completed an extensive analysis of your competitor's sites and should now have a clear idea of where they're shining and where they're failing.

You should also have an increasing list of content ideas of your own.

The good news? The time consuming part is over; however, competitor monitoring doesn't end here.

To remain ahead, keeping a regular eye – even if it's just the one – on your competitors' behaviour is paramount.

Don't despair; this process doesn't have to take over your life, especially with the help of these tools.

Google Alerts monitor changes in content based around selected queries.

If new content pops up related to the term, you'll receive a notification; either as it happens, weekly or daily, depending on your preference.

By monitoring competitor brand terms, as well as topics you are competing against them for, you'll always be on top of their activity.

We suggest creating 'labels' and utilising the 'filter' function of Gmail to direct notifications into appropriate folders, then set aside time each week to scour through alerts.

Monitoring competitor backlinks is as important as scrutinising your own, and is simple with Link Research Tools' Alerts, where you'll receive a notification each time they gain a new link.

Again, we'd suggest directing notifications into relevant folders and setting aside time once a week to sift through. If a competitor gains a link from a site that looks like a potential prospect, log it to refer back to when outreaching.

Accuranker allows you to keep an eye on rankings for selected keywords.

By monitoring your competitors, you can track their progress and delve into their strategy and tactics, should their ratings fluctuate.

Use this to pull together a list of organic and AdWords keywords your competitors are targeting.

Checking this regularly will allow you to identify any key changes in their PPC and SEO campaigns.

As mentioned in the chapter two, Searchmetrics allows you to track online visibility against your competition.

By inputting your own URL, and up to three competitors', the results graph will give you a clear indication of organic and paid visibility against rivals.

Use this to subscribe to multiple blog RSS feeds; it's a great way to monitor content posted on competitors' blogs.

Social Media Lists

Building lists on social channels, like Facebook and Twitter, is a simple and free way to track what your competitors are posting, without relying on content appearing in your feed or having to visit their pages directly.

Create lists on Facebook and Twitter, then set aside regular time to check out posts.

The above can seem daunting, but once it becomes part of your routine you'll find regular analysis a breeze.

Download our calendar schedule to help effortlessly incorporate monitoring into your working week.

When monitoring your competitors' progress, it's important to make a note of statistical comparison to allow yourself to benchmark against them.

As discussed, much of your analysis will be qualitative; identifying strengths, weaknesses and gaps in the industry. However, if you're looking to catch up with or overtake the competition, keeping an eye on their figures is important.

A few things we suggest you monitor are:

  • Social following.
  • Number of backlinks (using Majestic).
  • Visibility (using Searchmetrics).
  • Rankings (using Accuranker).

How to Benchmark using Accuranker

Sign up for a free trial to get started, then follow these steps to start benchmarking against your competitors.

  • 1Select the 'domains' tab on the left hand side.
  • 2Next, select 'competitors' and add a domain.
  • 3Continue adding competitors this way.
  • 4Then select the 'keywords' tab and hit the refresh button.
  • 5In the 'competitors' tab, you can then see their rankings against your chosen keywords, allowing you to compare your position against them.
  • 6Monitor this regularly.

Chapter 8CONCLUSION

So, you've completed an in-depth, cross-channel competitor analysis, incorporated a regular monitoring schedule into your routine and are well on your way to outshining the competition.

From onsite analysis to scrutinising content and social channels; our resources should help make the process less gruelling, allowing you to create a structured method.

The resources are available to download again here:

  • Onsite analysis checklist.
  • Content analysis checklist.
  • Social analysis checklist.
  • Regular monitoring calendar.

The tools we have suggested are just a handful of what's available, but the graphic below will work as a reminder on those we have suggested and at what stage of the analysis process they will be needed.

When benchmarking, ensure you're clear on your reasons for doing so, and define a structure. Ask yourself, what is it you're looking to improve and what areas are you most focused on?

Keeping an active eye on competitors is crucial; if your time is limited, focus on the channels you're most keen to overtake.

And, most importantly, don't become so focused on your competitors that you lose sight of your own goals.

Their strengths and weaknesses should be used to build upon your strategy and guide your ideas; but don't be afraid to try something new before assessing your efforts post-campaign.

Good luck!

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