Day 5 : Perform Competitor Research

Once you register on Google Analytics and create your Google Business page and Facebook page, your main steps start towards increasing the traffic to your website. Before you start, you should know who your competitors are and who you must fight against to reach the top rank in Google search results. Many people know what SEO is and how it reflects on your website. So most of the times, they focus only on how to increase their visibility ignoring the fact that there are many others doing the same thing for their respective websites. People usually neglect the importance of competition. Here comes the role of Competitor Research. Let us first understand what competitor research means.

SEO basically is a discipline that mainly focuses on increasing the visibility of your website so that your website ranks in the organic search result of Google. Organic search results are the first ten search results that come when a user searches for some word. For example, if you search for some particular service, many websites come up giving you the same services. The top five among them are considered to be your competitor sites. Keyword research also plays an important role in this as it tells that if the user makes a particular search, which websites will come in the organic search result. In the language of SEO, this search entered by the user is called the keyword.

Competitor analysis/research is a marketing strategy adopted to know who your competitors are and what are their strengths and weaknesses. Once you get an idea about this, you can drive the SEO Strategies of your website accordingly to stay on the top and to enhance your presence on Google. Many companies hire professionals for this task. Competitor analysis helps in knowing what field do your competitors lack in so that you can take its advantage and do not make that mistake for your business. You should have a solid knowledge about your market competition.

There are many benefits of Competitor Research, like:

1. A better understanding of market
2. Better knowledge of our target audience
3. Predict the market potential
4. know what our competitors offer
5. Keeping an eye on the prices offered by the competitors for services
6. Finding new and potential customers
7. Determine the economic environment of market

Competitor research should not be underestimated as it also helps in being updated about the new trends in your respective industry. Once you know what is the latest stuff going on, you too can upgrade your business strategy one step ahead.

So let us now see, what steps are to be taken to perform the competitor research.

1. Define your market

The first and the foremost step is to identify and determine your market area i.e what category of a market are you going to be a part of. Determine what type of customers does this market has, what are their needs, what more do they expect from this market type and what can be the improvements. This, in turn, will give you an idea of which are the companies that are able to satisfy the customer needs and which companies do the customers prefer the most. You should also keep an eye on who are the new entrants in this market so that you can always be ahead of them. Analyse how do these companies differ from each other or what factors are making them stand out in the market crowd. If there are many products being offered in the market for the same customer needs, try to group their features together so that you can offer all the services in one. This will help you be distinguished from others.

2. Make a list of your top 5 competitors

Search for a particular keyword related to your industry on Google, the first 5 search results can be your potential competitors.

Make a list of these competitors separately and write down necessary details about them. The list may include:

1. Their main area of service
2. What customer requirements do they focus on the most
3. What place or region do they focus on more
4. Their Market share and contribution
5. Their strengths, objectives, and areas they lack in

3. Analyse competitors and their strategies

1. Analyse their site optimization- See what meta tags are they using for the keywords that are making them rank better than you, what is their page summary, etc.
2. Content quality– Content on a web page plays an important role in its ranking. Know the quality of their content so that yours can be made even better.
3. Social Media presence– Know what social media platforms are they using to increase their customer interaction. Create a Facebook, Google+ and Twitter Profile to increase your online presence.
4. Analyse Their Backlinks– Find out where are they putting their backlinks more often and which platform has a quick response to backlinks.
5. Their marketing and promotion budget– You can know this by their ads on Google. Get an idea about their paid campaigns like Google Adwords or Facebook PPC (pay per click).

Always keep your knowledge updated about your competitors and strategies they adopt.

4. Strengths and weakness

Once you get a hold of who your competitors are and what business tactics do they use, you can easily determine their strengths and weaknesses. Do not feel inferior by their strengths. Rather, take these as your main points of action so that you can outdo your competition.

Determining their weaknesses is equally important so that you can convert them into your strengths. Before they work on their shortcomings, take immediate action and make those weaknesses your plus points.

You can keep following points in mind while summarising their strengths and weakness-

1. Sales
2. Customer awareness
3. Loyalty for customers
4. Market share
5. Product quality
6. The efficiency of Salesforce
7. New investment capacity
8. Future plans and strategies
9. Capacity utilization, and more

5. Analyse their Keywords

There are many tools available on the market that can give you an idea of what keywords are your competitor sites using. These tools are both paid and unpaid. Unpaid tools usually give you a brief idea for keywords and for further details, you eventually have to subscribe to their paid services. The paid tools not only generate keywords related to your website, but they also let you know the keywords of other sites as well. For example, Spyfu is a paid tool that helps you generate keywords for your as well as other websites. Google Adwords also has a tool called Keyword Planner that serves this purpose. By this, you can easily know what keywords you should focus on more for better ranking of your website.

6. SEO Structure of Competitors

Keep a track of what SEO structure do they use in their page content, meta tags etc. See how frequently do they use keywords in their content. The best way of determining this is by checking if they have they use keywords in-

1. The page title
2. The URL architecture
3. H1 Tags
4. Content
5. Internal links
6. Image alt text

If the content on a webpage is written keeping the SEO Structure in mind, the page will automatically rank better.

7. Identify the points you can improve in

Once you follow all the above-mentioned points correctly, you will have a better idea of where you stand in the market and where you can show more improvement. When you have all the details about your competitors and their strategies, you can learn at least one thing from each one of them to improve your online presence and search ranking. When you focus on points that your competitors are neglecting, you have better chances of increasing the traffic to your website and attracting potential customers.

The main reasons why we should perform Competitive Research are:

1. Accurate market Study and knowledge
2. Predict the organization’s demand and supply beforehand
3. To decide to strategy to be adopted
4. Know the latest market trends
5. To know the ways of organization growth
6. It helps in deciding what steps should be taken next

Now, that you have an idea of what competitor research is and how it should be done, we can move on to the next part i.e. keyword research. Keyword Research is basically analyzing what keywords to use for your business and website so that you get a better ranking in Google search results.