Competitive analysis is the process of identifying and researching your competitors to get the information you need to gain a competitive advantage.
You need to conduct a competitive analysis as a part of your market research. Only then can you develop an effective marketing strategy to steer the ship in the right direction.
Here’s how to do the competitive analysis in 8 simple steps:
Find your competitors
Get background information
Analyze competitors’ products and services
Get familiar with their targeting and positioning
Discover competitors’ distribution channels
Dive into communication strategies
Do some ghost shopping
Conduct a SWOT analysis
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Follow along for your business with our free competitive analysis template.
1. Find your competitors
A competitor is any company that solves the same problem as you in your target market.
For example, Pepsi and Coke are competitors because they sell the same thing to the same market. However, not every similar business is a direct competitor, which is a common mistake people make.
Take restaurants and cafes, for example. Both of them are places to eat, but they don’t compete with each other. Restaurants are for meals, whereas cafes are for light bites or refreshments. It’s a similar story for freelance vs. enterprise solutions. The products might be similar, but the same solutions don’t appeal to both demographics.
Now that you understand that, your first step is to find 3-5 relevant competitors (anything more would be overkill).
Here are three ways to do it:
a) Look at keyword overlap
Everyone should know at least one competitor, and you can use that information to find others. Just plug your competitor’s domain into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and check the Competing Domains report. It shows other websites that rank for many of the same keywords as your known competitor.
For example, if you work for ConvertKit, you might look for sites that compete with MailChimp.
1 mailchimp competing domains
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
Just keep in mind that not all of those domains will be your business competitors. Some websites might monetize the same traffic with affiliate marketing or ads.
If you don’t use Ahrefs, try searching Google for related:competitor.com.
2 google related
This search operator finds sites related to a given domain. It works well, but the downside is that it usually only finds a handful of related sites. In this case, MailChimp, Aweber, Campaign Monitor, and three others.
For the rest of this article, I’ll use Mailchimp as an example of a competitor because it’s likely a brand you already know.
b) Look who’s advertising
Looking for businesses that bid on industry keywords can be a little more reliable than looking at organic traffic overlap. That’s because it tends to surface direct competitors rather than blogs or other sites with different business models.
For example, look at the ads for “email marketing software.”