A competitor website audit is a crucial step in staying ahead of the game. It allows you to analyze your competitors' strengths and weaknesses, identify areas for improvement, and develop strategies to outshine them.
To conduct a thorough audit, start by gathering information on your top competitors, including their website structure, content, and user experience. This will help you understand their online presence and identify opportunities to differentiate your own website.
A well-planned audit will also involve analyzing your competitors' technical SEO, including their meta tags, header tags, and internal linking strategies. By doing so, you can ensure your website is optimized for search engines and ranks higher in search results.
By following these steps, you'll be able to uncover valuable insights and develop a comprehensive plan to outshine your competitors and drive more traffic to your website.
Setting Up for Audit
To set up for a competitor website audit, it's essential to identify the competitors to analyze. This can be done through Google searches and industry-specific directories.
Clear goals and objectives for the audit help maintain focus on critical aspects of competitor analysis, ensuring actionable and relevant insights. Setting clear goals ensures that the analysis leads to actionable outcomes, making the entire process more effective and focused.
Gathering the right analysis tools is also crucial for comprehensive data collection on competitor performance. Analysis tools should track traffic, keyword positions, and backlink profiles.
Get the Lay of the Land
As you start your competitor website audit, it's essential to get a good understanding of your competitors' online presence. This is where "getting the lay of the land" comes in. You'll want to note the design, layout, and user-friendliness of the site. A thoughtfully laid-out website is a sign of a business that knows what it's doing.
Pay particular attention to the homepage, product or service offerings, and any unique website features that differentiate the experience. You should also look at the competitor's support pages, which can give you a sense of the level of customer support they provide. Note down anything that jumps out at you.
As you navigate their website, identify any usability issues, loading speed problems, or broken links. If certain areas of the website are more polished than others, ask yourself why pages on these topics have received more investment and attention. Just like with the SEO analysis, there's a good chance it's because these sections of the website are more valuable to your competitor.
Here are some key areas to focus on when getting the lay of the land:
- Homepage
- Product or service offerings
- Unique website features that differentiate the experience
- Support pages
Remember, this is not just about copying your competitors, but about understanding what works for them and how you can improve your own website. By paying attention to these details, you'll get a better sense of your competitors' strengths and weaknesses, and be able to make informed decisions about your own marketing strategy.
Customer Feedback Check
Customer feedback is a treasure trove of information that can help you understand what your competitors are doing right and wrong.
To get a comprehensive view of your competitors' customer feedback, check their website for any feedback they've shared. Businesses with lots of positive feedback often feature it prominently on their website, so look for aggregated Trustpilot scores or customer testimonials.
You can also seek out feedback left for your competitors across multiple platforms, such as Trustpilot and Google Reviews. This will give you a more representative sample of consumer sentiment towards your competitors.
Look for what their customers appreciate, and what they complain about. This can give you an idea of the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors' products, which can inform your own business strategy.
Pay attention to customer complaints, as they can highlight potential areas for improvement in your competitors' products. By understanding what customers like and dislike, you can identify opportunities to differentiate your own business.
News Updates
When businesses have news to share, they often put it on their website first.
Any large enterprise will likely release their news updates on their website, with press releases and keynote speeches being secondary options.
Competitors may also announce upcoming releases, product changes, new partnerships, and rebranding efforts.
You can analyze their strategic moves and changes in direction to better understand their motivations and the future of the industry.
Businesses may reveal their view of the competitive landscape through their announcements, which can be compared to your own organization's beliefs and opinions.
Large enterprises tend to release their news updates quickly, often within minutes of the initial release.
How to Metadata
Metadata is a crucial aspect of setting up for an audit, and it's essential to understand what it entails. Metadata refers to the data that provides information about other data, such as file names, dates, and authors.
To start collecting metadata, you'll need to identify the types of data that are relevant to your audit. This might include documents, emails, or other digital files that contain sensitive information.
Metadata can be collected from various sources, including databases, spreadsheets, and document management systems. For example, an email metadata can include the sender's name, recipient's name, subject line, and date sent.
Organizing metadata in a consistent and standardized way is vital for efficient analysis. This can be achieved by creating a metadata dictionary or schema that outlines the fields and formats used.
The metadata dictionary should include fields such as file type, date created, and author, which can be extracted from various digital files. By doing so, you'll be able to easily analyze and compare metadata across different files and systems.
Competitor Research
Competitor research is a crucial step in a competitor website audit. To begin, identify your key competitors and set clear goals for your audit.
To conduct a competitor website audit, start by analyzing their keyword lists and identifying missing keywords that can help drive traffic to your site. Use tools like Serpstat to compare your website's keyword lists with those of your competitors, and find additional ways to bring traffic to your website. This can help you enrich your website's pages with relevant, high-performing keywords.
You can also use tools like Serpstat to analyze competitors' PPC campaigns and identify effective keywords for which you didn't start advertising yet. By analyzing competitors' keywords, you can find additional ways to bring traffic to your website and prepare a content plan for creating new pages, updating old ones, or adjusting website linking.
Here are some key tools and resources to help you with competitor research:
- Serpstat: A tool that provides insights into competitors' keyword lists, PPC campaigns, and SEO performance.
- SimilarWeb: A tool that provides insights on traffic sources, paid keywords, audience demographics, and traffic statistics for competitors' websites.
- Ahrefs: A tool that provides insights into competitors' backlink profiles and ongoing keyword strategies.
By using these tools and resources, you can gather valuable data to distinguish your business and improve your marketing efforts.
Review Product Offerings
Reviewing a competitor's product offerings is a crucial step in understanding their strengths and weaknesses. This information can help you identify gaps in the market and opportunities for differentiation.
You can learn a lot about a competitor's product offerings from their website, even if you don't have access to their products. Some websites list pricing information, while others have detailed information about their product offerings.
Pay particular attention to unique selling points (USPs) and pricing strategies used by your competitors. USPs form the basis of differentiation, so you can use this information to build sales enablement material.
Your sales reps will need to handle objections in the form of prospects bringing up these USPs, so it's essential to know how and where your offerings differ from the competitor's. This information should be included in your sales battlecards for the best results.
Competitive product analysis examines key differences and similarities in products within the same market niche. It assesses competitors' product lines by analyzing their offerings, quality, pricing, and discounts.
Understanding competitors' pricing strategies and unique selling propositions is crucial for communicating your value proposition effectively. By recognizing competitors' USPs, you can improve your value proposition and stand out in the market.
Conducting a competitor website audit involves analyzing their website structure, evaluating products, exploring content strategies, assessing SEO performance, and monitoring social media. This comprehensive analysis can provide valuable insights into effective competitor SEO techniques.
Assess Social Media Presence
Assessing a competitor's social media presence is a crucial step in understanding their online strategy and audience engagement. This involves analyzing their engagement rates, strategies, visibility of social sharing buttons, and calls to action.
You can learn a lot about a competitor's products, user experience, and more by reading customer feedback and reviews on their social media profiles. This is a form of customer research that can help you identify areas for improvement.
Evaluating a competitor's social media presence typically involves looking at their original content, curated content, visual content, and tone. By understanding these elements, you can identify successful strategies and areas where your social media efforts can be improved.
To conduct a social media audit, visit your competitors' social platforms and look for how often they post, whether they use original images or graphics, and if their content leads back to their website. Engagement rates, voice and tone, CTAs, and copy quality are also important factors to consider.
Monitoring competitors' social media channels can provide insights into how they engage with their audience and what content resonates most, informing your social media strategy. This can help you determine if a new platform is worth investing time in for your business.
Engagement rates on social media can help you understand how well your competitors are connecting with their audience. Look for likes, comments, and shares to gauge their level of engagement.
Conducting PPC by Domain or Keyword
Conducting PPC by Domain or Keyword is a crucial step in competitor research. You can't carry out an accurate analysis of competitors in contextual advertising without using special tools.
To start, enter a domain address in the search bar and select the search system, and go to Domain analysis → PPC Research → Competitors. This will show you the closest competitors for each keyword.
If you need to check certain domains by keyword, change the list manually by clicking the "List of competitors" button. You can also use the Keyword Research tool by entering a keyword in the search bar and selecting a database (region).
Serpstat analyzes a domain's ad campaign keywords and shows relevant competitors. Note that it's helpful if contextual advertising is not yet configured.
To conduct a PPC analysis by keyword, enter a keyword in the search bar and select a database (region). Serpstat will redirect you to the Keyword Research tool, then go to PPC Research → Competitors.
Some experts believe that competitor analysis is just a waste of time, while others think it's essential for devising your own advertising strategy. Either way, it's worth researching successful websites.
Here's a step-by-step guide to conducting PPC analysis by domain or keyword:
- Enter a domain address in the search bar and select the search system
- Go to Domain analysis → PPC Research → Competitors
- Change the list manually by clicking the "List of competitors" button (if needed)
- Use the Keyword Research tool by entering a keyword in the search bar and selecting a database (region)
By following these steps, you can gain valuable insights into your competitors' ad campaigns and develop a more effective PPC strategy.
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is a valuable tool for analyzing competitors' online presence and making informed decisions about your digital marketing strategies. It provides insights on traffic sources, paid keywords, audience demographics, and traffic statistics for competitors' websites.
By using SimilarWeb's insights, businesses can optimize their SEO content strategy by understanding traffic origins and competitor keyword performance. SimilarWeb is invaluable for businesses as it provides accurate and comprehensive data that enhances competitive advantage.
Conducting a competitor website audit is crucial for gathering valuable data to distinguish your business, and SimilarWeb is an essential part of this process. SimilarWeb helps businesses identify effective competitor SEO techniques, ultimately enhancing their strategy.
SimilarWeb's insights can be used to refine your keyword strategy and improve your search engine rankings by understanding the keywords driving traffic to competitors' websites. This information can help you optimize your keyword strategy and enhance your visibility in search engine results.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is a crucial step in a competitor website audit. You can use tools like Serpstat to find keywords within striking distance by entering up to 3 competitors and analyzing how your ranking keywords overlap.
By analyzing competitors' keywords, you can find additional ways to bring traffic to your website. This can be done by comparing the keyword lists of successful competitors and your own website.
To begin, it's worth comparing the keyword lists of successful competitors and your own website. This method will help you understand how competitive your site is.
Searching for missing keywords will help you enrich your website's pages with relevant, high-performing keywords. You can do this by entering your domain address in Serpstat, selecting a database, and going to Domain Analysis → SEO Research → Domain vs. Domain.
Once you've analyzed competitors' keyword lists and found missing keywords, you need to understand how the keywords are distributed on the website pages. You can check the distribution of keywords among the website pages using Serpstat's unique "Tree view" report.
Here are some key points to keep in mind when researching keywords for a competitor website audit:
- Analyze competitors' keyword lists to find additional ways to bring traffic to your website.
- Compare the keyword lists of successful competitors and your own website to understand how competitive your site is.
- Search for missing keywords to enrich your website's pages with relevant, high-performing keywords.
- Use Serpstat's "Tree view" report to check the distribution of keywords among website pages.
By following these steps, you can gain valuable insights into your competitors' keyword strategies and improve your own SEO efforts.
Content Analysis
Content analysis is a crucial step in a competitor website audit. It involves evaluating a competitor's content types, engagement levels, and unique content offerings. By reviewing a sample of their content pieces, you can assess their content quality and identify proprietary resources and authority.
To gauge engagement levels, analyze the average comments, shares, and likes on their content. This will help you understand what resonates with their audience and prioritize focus areas for content creation and marketing strategies. You can use tools like Ahrefs to gain insights into traffic and content republishing frequency.
A detailed analysis of a competitor's content will help you devise a more effective content strategy that aligns with your audience's preferences and enhances your competitive position. By examining the frequency and type of content they publish, you can identify successful engagement tactics and refine your content marketing approach.
Comparing Content
To get a better understanding of your competitors' content strategies, you need to analyze their top-ranking content. Top Competing Content can help you identify what content is outranking you, so you can make informed decisions around content creation.
You can use tools like Serpstat to see their most visible content and the keywords it's ranking for, all in one place. This will help you understand their content strategy and identify areas for improvement.
A detailed analysis of your competitors' content can reveal their tone, style, and messaging. This includes analyzing blog posts, articles, product landing pages, help documentation, and news updates. You can also examine the engagement levels of their content by analyzing average comments, shares, and likes.
By understanding your competitors' content strategies, you can develop a more effective content strategy that aligns with your audience's preferences and enhances your competitive position.
Here are some key areas to focus on when analyzing your competitors' content:
- Content types (e.g. blog posts, articles, product landing pages)
- Engagement levels (e.g. average comments, shares, likes)
- Unique content offerings
- Content frequency and type
- Keyword usage and optimization
By analyzing these areas, you can identify opportunities and gaps in your competitors' content strategies and develop a more effective content strategy for your own business.
Their Job Postings
Analyzing a competitor's job postings can reveal valuable insights into their priorities and future plans. This can be done by examining their job board on their website.
A sudden surge in hiring activity can indicate significant changes are on the horizon, such as a product overhaul or investment in data analysis. For example, a sudden influx of product manager hires might signal substantial product changes.
Backlink Analysis
Backlink analysis is a crucial step in a competitor website audit. It helps you understand how your competitors build their backlink profiles and identify areas for improvement.
Analyzing a competitor's backlinks can be done by examining their anchor list and checking the quality of their linking donors. You should also evaluate their effective link-building strategies and control the growth of their backlink profile.
To analyze a competitor's backlink profile, you can use tools like Serpstat, which provides a general description of the backlink profile, including the number of internal and external domains, backlinks, and malicious domains. You can also use Ahrefs, which offers insights on organic traffic, paid advertising, and backlink profiles.
Here are the five basic steps to analyze a competitor's backlinks:
- Analyze backlinks and anchors of top competitors;
- Evaluate effective link-building strategies;
- Check the quality of backlinks;
- Control the growth of the backlink profile;
- Regularly check backlinks to keep your website adjusted to search engine updates.
Backlink Strategies
Backlinks are a crucial ranking factor, and diversity in backlinks positively affects a website's position in search results. Search engines recognize irrelevant links if a website uses black-hat SEO methods.
To analyze competitors' backlink strategies, you need to analyze backlinks and anchors of top competitors, evaluate effective link-building strategies, check the quality of backlinks, and control the growth of the backlink profile.
The leading indicators that you need to pay attention to are the quality of linking donors, anchor list, backlink growth dynamics, etc. Regularly checking backlinks is essential to keep your website adjusted to search engine updates.
You can analyze a competitor's anchor list using the Serpstat Backlink analysis tool. The text of anchor links includes a query that redirects to the definite page. Text of non-anchor links is either a URL of a page or a text without keywords.
To compile an anchor list, the main factor you should consider is not to spam link texts with keywords. Anchor analysis can be done using the Serpstat Backlink analysis tool.
To determine the quality of a backlink profile, enter a domain address in the Serpstat search bar and go to the "Backlink analysis" section. You will get a general description of the backlink profile, including the number of internal and external domains, backlinks, malicious domains, and more.
Here are the five basic steps to analyze competitors:
- Analyze backlinks and anchors of top competitors
- Evaluate effective link-building strategies
- Check the quality of backlinks
- Control the growth of the backlink profile
- Regularly check backlinks to keep your website adjusted to search engine updates
Ahrefs provides insights on organic traffic, paid advertising, and backlink profiles. The Site Explorer feature offers in-depth insights into organic search traffic and paid search strategies, helping you understand how competitors drive traffic to their websites.
When analyzing landing pages, pay attention to design, product (service) presented, and communication with the customer. You can view landing pages manually or use SEO automation services like Serpstat to check landing pages and ads by domain and keyword.
Types of: Direct
Direct competitors offer similar products or services, directly fulfilling customer needs. They compete for the same target audience, making it essential to analyze their strategies closely to identify strengths and weaknesses.
Direct competitors are businesses that offer the same or very similar products or services as your own, and they're likely to be vying for the same customers. This makes them a crucial part of your backlink analysis.
Analyzing direct competitors' strategies is key to understanding the market landscape and identifying effective strategies for addressing customer needs.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I track my competitors website?
To track your competitors' website, start by gathering valuable competitor spying tools and analyzing their web content, social media campaigns, and keywords. This will give you a comprehensive view of their online presence and help you stay ahead of the competition.
What is included in a website audit?
A website audit reviews a site's performance, functionality, and search engine visibility to identify areas for improvement and increase online traffic. This comprehensive review helps ensure your site is easily found and accessible to users and search engines.
Sources
- https://moz.com/competitive-research
- https://www.competitiveintelligencealliance.io/competitor-website-analysis/
- https://serpstat.com/blog/analysis-of-competitors-websites-an-extensive-guide/
- https://asymmetric.pro/mastering-the-competitor-website-audit-essential-steps-tools/
- https://www.idx.inc/blog/web-design-and-development/competitive-website-audit-6-key-things-to-look-for
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