Find out who your online competitors are and what they do
Your competition is incredibly important to keep an eye on, and should be an essential part of your online marketing strategy. But how do you know who exactly your competitors are and what they are all doing? Complementing our earlier blog, in this blog we will take a closer look at your online competition. This will help you discover exactly who your online competitors are and what they are doing.
After our previous blog 'Who are my competitors and what do they do?', in which you could discover what forms of competition there are and that competition certainly doesn't always have to be something negative, we thought it was time to update this blog article to a new version. In this new blog, we will further discuss competition; who are your competitors, what are they doing, and how do you make sure you catch up with your competitors?
Sterce Model
Within our strategic Sterc model, we have always set up a chapter that focuses entirely on competition: who are your competitors, what forms of competition actually exist and what can you learn from them?
Competition is indispensable for development and to improve yourself. Together you fight for success. Competition creates commotion, it keeps the market exciting and ensures that you take big and small steps forward - and also regularly backward. It is always important to keep an eye on market developments, trends and your competition and make sure you don't end up at the bottom of the search results, or tucked into the unvisited corner of the shopping street.
Want to know more about creating a solid strategy and analysing your competition? Then download our Sterc model and arrive at your online strategy in four steps.
Find out who your competitors are
To do a thorough competitive analysis, it is important to know exactly who your competitors are. Competitors are everywhere. As we also mention in our previous blog, you have two forms of competition:
- Offline competitors: Those who fish in the same pond, have their shop on the same street, are locally findable, and focus on exactly the same target audience with exactly the same specialisation
- Online competitors: Competitors that can be found all over the world. They focus on the same keywords as you, but through a sound online strategy (or maybe even dumb luck) can find themselves in a better spot in the search results.
In this blog, we focus on online competition and there are several tools you can use to find out your competition.
Keyword analysis
Before we can find out who your competitors are, it is important to know what you want to be found on. This is because, as you have read earlier, online competitors focus on the same keywords as you do. You probably know yourself what you want to focus on online, but it can always be useful to take a look at which other keywords link to it. To do this, you can search Google for a keyword you know and then look at the 'related searches' below the search results. Or use the well-known Answer the public tool.
MOZ1 additionally gives a useful tip that you should find out what the keyword gap is. In other words, the gap between keywords. What this means in short is: which keywords is your competition scoring on and you are not? With the MOZ Keyword Explorer and the SEMrush Magic Keyword Tool, you can find out which keywords you are ranking for and which your competition is ranking for. You could then check your competitors' websites to see why they are ranking for that keyword and you are not.
Who is your online competition?
Also for your competition, there are several tools that can help you in this search. Before we tell more about the tools we recommend for competition analysis, the most important tip we can give is: ask around among your colleagues, employees, employer or your existing customers. They know your business better than anyone else, are the 'old hands' in the business, and it is always useful to know who your environment sees as competition.
In addition, then, there are several tools you can use to find out who your competitors are. Here is a brief overview of these tools:
MOZ
Although like almost every platform, MOZ gives more info when you pay for it, MOZ has a handy tool that lets you see your website's performance, keywords, competition and featured snippets at a glance. Check out Domain Analysis to see what you can already get out of this. The main drawback of this tool is that in the free version (like many other tools) it only shows 5-10 results from each topic. A handy workaround for this is to enter the competition shown in the domain name and then look at their competition again. In the end, you do get a nice list of valuable competition to keep an eye on.
SEMrush
SEMrush is almost identical to MOZ: you enter a URL and get a clear overview of the results on keywords, links and competition in the free version. In addition, SEMrush offers several other free tools you can use to do further research on keywords, your website's performance, links and much more.
Similar tools are Ahrefs and Spyfu, and probably many more. Of course, if you know of another useful tool that you would like to share with us, feel free to let us know.
Google & social media
A quick Google search will also give you a lot of information. Just search for the keyword you want to score on or the industry you work in and see which companies appear high in the search results. In no time, you'll have a list of companies that are in the same location as you, and have a similar business. You can do the same in social media too.
Find out what your competitors are doing (so well)
The most obvious method to see exactly what your competition is doing is to visit their website. Therefore, look at what you yourself think of the website first, and use this as inspiration for optimising your website.
In addition, you can also use the handy tools such as the following:
Google offers many different Chrome extensions that can help you find out how well your and your competition's websites are doing. For example, use the MOZ extension for Chrome, or search within the Chrome extensions for 'Competitor'. Additionally, this list of Ahrefs can also help you find an SEO Chrome extension.
Social media
For Facebook and Instagram, you can look at what your competitors post when. Is there a certain storyline in the posts, what do they mainly post about and what seems to work for them. Of course, this does not necessarily mean that this will work for your business right away, but a little inspiration from time to time can't hurt.
In Twitter, you can easily follow your competition via lists. Create a new list, add your competitor's name to it, and you can easily see what your competition is posting, as well as what other people are saying about your competitors.
This way, you can easily see what other people are saying about your competitors.
HubSpot
With HubSpot's competitor report (From Marketing Hub Professional), you get insight into your competition's online performance. You have to enter the competition yourself and then HubSpot automatically shows online visibility, link authority, and your rank. In addition, HubSpot uses this to give insight into how you could possibly improve your own website.
Advertisements
Finally, you can also take a look at what your competitors are advertising on. The SEMrush tool easily shows which ads the company has within Google, among others. In addition, social media is also super easy to see what ads a Facebook page is running. To do this, all you have to do is visit your competitor's Facebook page. Scroll down a bit and then on the right-hand side under 'Page transparency' click on show more, go to the ad library and voila, you will see all the ads the page is currently running. You can do the same thing in LinkedIn too, by going to your competitor's LinkedIn company page and clicking on the 'Ads' tab on the left.
You can do the same in LinkedIn, by going to your competitor's LinkedIn company page and clicking on the 'Ads' tab on the left.
This way, you can find out what your competitors are advertising, how they do it, with what tone of voice, and much more.