Complete Competitive Analysis in 7 Steps

Researching competitors in your industry helps you clearly see the competitive landscape, where your brand fits in it, and what you need to do to stand out and succeed.

A Competitive Analysis is a process that uncovers who your competitors are and how their products, positioning, strengths, and weaknesses parallel to your brand. It’s an analysis that helps you to analysis competitor research questions like:

Where does our brand stand?
What can we do that’s the same as our competitors?
What can we do that’s different from our competitors?
What are the opportunities in our market?
What can we do to beat competitors?
Where do we need to focus?

When you know how to do a competitive analysis, you can gain perceptions that direct your marketing approaches, market direction, and goal conversion.
You can:
See the strengths of others in your industry and opportunities where you can gain an edge.
See what strategies and channels are working well for competitors and industry leaders that might work for you too.
Categorize needs in the market that you can fill.
Categorize gaps in your marketing tactic.
Set targets for what you need to do to be competitive with others in your industry.

If you’re working with SEO clients, knowing how to do competitive research has added benefits. You can perform competitive website analysis.

Set expectations by showing clients what they need to do to be competitive.
Prove the value of your services by comparing success metrics to competitors.
Now that you know the benefits of competitive analysis in marketing, let’s look at how you can perform one for your brand or your clients.

Competitive Analysis in 7 Simple Steps

To help you learn how to do a competitive analysis, we put together this guide that explains what to do during each step, what competitor analysis tools you can use to uncover the data, and how to use the information to guide your marketing plan.

7. Identify your competitors
6. Compare marketing positioning
5. Compare site traffic and performance
4. Compare keywords
3. Compare share of voice
2. Compare backlinks
1. Compare SEO effectiveness

Identify your competitors: You can only perform competitive analysis in marketing if you know who your competitors are. Start by researching your industry to identify top players and leading brands. You may already know some of your competitors, but don’t rely exclusively on assumptions and existing knowledge. Research to make sure you aren’t missing any competitors flying under the radar.

Compare marketing positioning: Once you have a list of competitors, start analyzing them. Conduct a SWOT analysis that compares details related to both the brands and their customers.
An easy way to display this information is through a competitive matrix. A competitive matrix is a chart that plots a brand’s strengths, weaknesses, feature offerings, and other qualities. You can use it to identify gaps, opportunities, and threats related to:
Product features
Quality
Benefits
Pricing
Messaging
Customer sentiment
Customer segments

Compare site traffic and performance  : Next, research the reach of your competitors’ web presence and compare it to your brand and others in your industry. Collect data that shows how users engage with other websites. This data includes:
Monthly unique visitors
Number of page-views
Traffic sources
Bounce rates
Time on site
Page-views per user
Engagement rate

Compare keywords: Take a deeper look at your web presence compared to competitors by looking at competitor keywords. Conduct a keyword analysis that shows which organic keywords drive the most traffic to their site. Also, look at what paid keywords they target to see what terms they are paying to promote.

Compare share of voice: In step one, we looked at how you can use the share of voice to identify leaders in your industry.
Now, use the share of voice to compare keyword performance and search authority between you and your competitors. Perform a keyword analysis to see which competitors drive the most traffic for top keywords in your industry.

Compare backlinks: Another way to compare the online authority of your competitors is by looking at their backlink portfolio. Compare the quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to your site and your competitors. Also, look at the linking sites that your competitors have in common. If your competitors have links from the same site, you should also aim to get a link from the same site.
To estimate the quality of a backlink, look at the linking site’s Alexa Rank. Sites with a low Alexa Rank have high online authority; therefore, the link is more valuable than a link from a site that has very high Alexa Rank.

Compare SEO effectiveness: Finally, end your competitive analysis by looking at the SEO performance of your competitors. Do this by analyzing website metrics that illustrate SEO effectiveness. By including SEO as a benchmark in your competitive analysis, you’ll be able to understand if and how your on-page, off-page, and technical SEO health could be affecting your ability to compete in search.
Metrics in this part of your analysis may include:

Percent of traffic that comes from organic traffic
The volume of traffic organically
Page upload speed
Number of non-branded keywords
Alexa Ranking

Start Your Competitive Analysis
Now you know how to do a competitive analysis in seven simple steps, and why it’s so important for your brand. We’ve also covered several important competitor analysis tools that can help you with your process.
Start your full competitive analysis today by downloading our competitive analysis template. Then streamline your research by signing up for a free trial of Alexa’s Advanced Plan to access all of the competitive analysis tools mentioned in this post.