Competitor Analysis Strategy: 4 Proven Ways to Stay Ahead

You’re a business fighting for your place in a competitive marketplace. Another competitor comes along and, just like that, your customer base is under threat.

So, how can you stay ahead? Because there’s no way to stop new competitors popping up – only the option to adapt and pivot quickly when they do.

The best way to do this? With the help of effective competitor analysis strategies. Because knowing your competition enables you to identify key opportunities, fend off threats and adapt your strategies so you can maintain that all-important competitive advantage.

4 competitor analysis strategies

When it comes to keeping your competitive edge, understanding how your competitors operate, including what their strengths and weaknesses are and how they choose to engage their markets, is the key.

Here are four super useful strategies for competitor analysis that you’ll want to keep implementing consistently – as a dedication to knowing your market, competitors and target audience helps you make smart decisions based on informed, data-driven insights.

1. Research your market

Successful businesses don’t just react to trends, they anticipate them 📈 A deep understanding of your market environment is essential if you want to be able to do this.

Luckily, with Similarweb’s Market Overview, you get in-depth insight into the size of the market, growth trends and the top industry leaders. This includes valuable metrics such as total unique visitors, growth rates, the distribution of market share among top players, and the geographic distribution of traffic. This data forms the bedrock of informed business decisions. Here’s how it looks:

Imagine one of your key objectives is to increase your market reach. Knowing the regions experiencing the fastest growth can help you come up with a plan – to either embark on an aggressive expansion into new markets or strengthen your hold on existing ones. This data-driven approach can reduce the risks when entering new markets and present a great opportunity for organic growth.

Overall, the metrics on offer provide a very good foundation for making data-driven decisions, helping you to adjust competitive analysis and strategies in line with market conditions as they evolve (which they will, constantly!)

2. Identify your competitors

It may be easy to identify your direct competitors, but when it comes to analyzing website traffic, every site that takes clicks away from yours is considered a competitor 🔎

How can you catch them all? Using Similarweb’s Website Performance module. With it, you can benchmark your online prowess against all others competing for the same audience. It’s more than simply knowing about the big, established brands in the industry – it’s identifying every site that’s eating into your market share. Armed with this knowledge, you can better protect yourself against your more invisible competitors.

Using Similarweb, you can compare metrics like total visits per month, unique visits and average visit duration, as well as the top performing traffic sources with up to 5 competitors at a time:

Without this kind of detailed competitor traffic analysis, it’s all too easy to yield market share to competitors you don’t know about.

Let’s say you’re an ecommerce platform. Benchmarking visits to your website per month and average visit duration against similar platforms can highlight where you are falling short in terms of engaging with your audience. Plus, knowing your competitors’ best sources of traffic can teach you something about how you could better optimize your own marketing channels:

Benchmarking against industry leaders helps you keep track of your relative positioning in the market, and find ways to implement new strategies that will help you to perform even better. Similarweb can help you decode their performance metrics so you can fine-tune your engagement strategies, bringing you a step closer to gaining a competitive edge.

3. Research your audience

It all begins with understanding what really resonates with your audience 👥

Similarweb’s View Traffic & Engagement and Analyze Audience Overlap tools give you an in-depth look into user behavior, traffic sources and audience overlap with top competitors. Together with extensive audience research, they paint a picture that allows you to personalize your offerings and tailor your strategies to really strike a cord with your customers.

Integrating the following metrics into your competitive analysis strategies will highlight which channels and content types engage better with your audience:

• Total visits and visit duration
• Pages per visit
• Bounce rates
• Shared unique visitors

Indeed, examining engagement metrics like total visits, visit duration, pages per visit and bounce rates gives a great snapshot of your website’s audience engagement compared with that of your rivals.

Shared unique visitors helps you understand the audience overlap to point you towards more under-served market segments. It’s this sort of insight that will create customer engagement strategies that keeping pace with the actual realities of your market.

For instance, if you discover that interactive content brings a lot of engagement to your competitors, then you’ll know that similar content strategies could improve your own metrics. This is a great example of how actionable insights can drive far more personalized and effective marketing campaigns.

4. Analyze your competitors’ websites

The final step is to scrutinize your competitors’ websites in depth🕵️

Everything from their content, SEO and paid strategies and campaigns to the analysis of their social media traffic and the technologies they use.

Content and SEO Strategy
Firstly, you need to know exactly how your competitors optimize their content for search.

Similarweb’s Organic Search Overview reveals exactly which keywords drive the most traffic to your rivals’ sites. You can then compare their organic and paid sources to find trends that will boost your own SEO strategy and drive more organic traffic to your site.

According to imFORZA, 93% of online experiences start with a search engine, which makes SEO one of your top priorities. Capturing these touchpoints with the right keyword strategies will help you deliver content that is truly valued by your target audience.

Paid campaigns

Paid campaigns have the potential to drive a lot of traffic and conversions. So, why not see what’s working for your competitors, and try to replicate that success?

With Similarweb’s Paid Search Overview, you’ll get a view into competitors’ PPC investments, targeted keywords and campaign success rates. This data can reveal your market’s most successful paid search techniques and PPC strategies.

Knowing where and when your competitors are focusing their paid efforts will help you invest at most opportune times. If your competitors get high returns on specific keywords or launch campaigns at a specific time of the year, you can adopt those in your campaigns to see similar success.

Social media traffic analysis

Social media is a key channel for traffic and engagement. With Similarweb’s Social Media Traffic Analysis, you’ll be able to see which platforms are working for your competitors, and get a glimpse into their social media strategy. You can then optimize your social media efforts simply by focusing on the high-engagement platforms.

A survey by HubSpot said that 87% of social media marketers agree that consumers will use social media to find brands more frequently than search engines. So, understanding the performance of your competitors on social media gives you a feel for the trends, content preferences and demographics of the audience that will set the stage for a better social media approach.

Technologies your competitors are using

Knowing what technologies your competitors use can give you a look into their capability and future plans.

Similarweb’s Website Technologies feature will help you identify the platforms, plugins and integrations they’re using. You can then choose whether to adopt similar technologies, if they’re relevant to your business.

For example, if one of your competitors begins to use a new ecommerce technology platform with better UX capabilities, you can quickly integrate the same tools and diminish their lead over you.

Start outpacing your competition

By implementing these competitor analysis strategies, your business is much more likely to achieve – and maintain – a competitive edge. Conducting market research, identifying competitors, understanding the audience and analyzing competitors’ websites allows you to gain actionable insights that might scale your business to success.

Want to perfect your strategy? Start using Similarweb’s competitor analysis tools today and begin outmaneuvering the competition.

FAQs

How can competitor analysis benefit my business?

Competitor analysis gives insight into market trends and consumer behavior and might reveal the gaps in your strategy. By knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the competition, you will be able to design a more informed strategy, sharpen your USPs, and stay competitive in the face of changing market conditions and new opportunities.

What should I include in my competitor analysis report?

Some of the things your report would cover would include target market positioning, product offerings, strategies on pricing, feedback from customers, and SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis.

Can competitor analysis be automated?

Yes, most of the tools have automated features that make data collection and analysis easy. These tools save time and give full insights, which you can easily integrate into your strategies. It’s entirely possible that these automated competitor analysis tools would both indicate changes in the activity of rivals and allow real-time alerts, all with analytics in an effort to get you to adjust your strategy in light of new data.

What is the role of social media in competitor analysis?

Social media is an important platform for analyzing the competition. Keeping tabs on your competitor’s social channels can give you real-time information pertaining to their marketing techniques, engagement with the audience, and customer sentiment. You also track the success of your competitors’ campaigns, content strategies, and customer reactions for tuning your approach using social media.

How do I keep up-to-date with new competitors?

You can keep yourself updated with new competitors through Google alerts, industry news, and SEO tools that allow you to track new entries and rankings. You will be able to secure some insight into emerging competitors by regularly engaging with industry networks.

by Monique Ellis

Content Marketing Manager

Monique, with 7 years in data storytelling, enjoys crafting content and exploring new places. She’s also a fan of historical fiction.