Whatever business you are in, analyzing and monitoring your competition is one of the perfect recipes for success. Let us see what an excellent competitive report should include and how to implement the same from the level of research to the level of action.
To succeed in your business, you should better understand your potential customers or target audience. One way of knowing this is to do extensive research on how your target audience finds and engages with your more established competitor. To do in-depth market research, you need to understand what is currently available on the market and where your business fits in. Also, you need to get an estimate of your future marketing budget besides identifying an effective marketing strategy.
Competitive research is not about copying your more successful competitor's marketing techniques. It is about comprehending your potential market and distinguishing your unique value proposition. Based on that, you have to devise a unique marketing strategy that is genuine if you are to conquer your niche segment. In other words, your marketing ideas should be original! For, copying your competitor's marketing ideas will not take you anywhere.
Competitive Benchmarking
This means gathering the performance data of your competitors and making a comprehensive analysis by comparing the same with your business. Competitive benchmarking is used to scale and monitor the performance of your business against competitors.
Performance Indicators
You can handpick your own performance indicators for tracking and comparison analysis with your competitor company. You can track public traffic data using tools such as Alexa, Ahrefs, and Similar Web, and organic rankings from Google Analytics. Though this section of your report is always an evolving phenomenon, it is fundamental because your entire competitive analysis will evolve based on your KPIs. There are fundamental KPIs you will be focusing on, and there are secondary metrics that will eventually help you identify competitors to keep a tab on. The basic overview of the competition section helps you look at your rival's secondary metrics at a cursory glance to know if there is a definitive pattern to look deeper into backlinks, social media followers, organic traffic, and more. Tools such as Keyhole, Ahrefs, and Similar Web will be of much use to you to collect all the requisite data.
Key SEO Techniques
Take a look at some important Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques your competitors are using. YFind out which keywords they are focusing on, how they optimize their title tags and meta descriptions, and how often they optimize their old content. Besides, check their website architecture, main navigation functions, internal linking technique, and most successful pages in terms of the page's appearance based on the ranking for the most competitive search queries and their semantic optimization strategy. Using the tool Text Optimiser, you can try running a few of the most important pages of your competitor's website to gauge whether your rival is doing an excellent job by optimizing for search intent. You can look at Content Gaps through their website research and understand which keywords of your rival's webpages are ranking, but your website is not. This is undoubtedly a fantastic way to expand your content strategy to add new keywords.
It will be ideal to entrust the competitive report creation to digital agencies like Cedilla Interactive. Their professionals are thorough with the latest tools, tactics, and best practices to help your brand scale faster.
