What is competitor analysis ?

Competitor or competitor analysis is the process of identifying businesses in your market that offer products or services similar to yours and evaluating them based on predetermined business criteria. Good analytics will help you see your competitors through your customers’ eyes to pinpoint where your business can thrive.

Why is competitor analysis important ?

Due to stay abreast of market trends and product offerings and to be able to disclose relevant information about market saturation, business opportunities, and industry best practices. It’s also important to know how your customers view them compared to your competitors.

Benefits of analyzing competitors

Analyzing competitors can help you learn new marketing tactics and persuasion techniques as well as find valuable ways to position your business. Here are five tools to analyze your competitors:

• SEMrush: This tool can provide live data on organic keywords, competitor URLs and real-time traffic.
• Ubersuggest: This is my go-to tool for competitor analysis and keyword research.
• Quick Sprout: This is my own SEO tool that analyzes up to 3 competitor sites and reveals what internal factors you should improve to get more traffic and organic rankings.
• Ahrefs: Very simple and detailed backlink research tool. It surfs the web, fetches your backlinks and the right anchor text to use. You can use it to find out where your competitors are getting inbound links and to improve your corporate governance.
• Alexa: If you want to understand your target market and target audience, this competitive intelligence tool will reveal audience demographics and site rankings in a given country.

What are the components of analyzing competitors ?

There are several other components to consider in analyzing competitors. It’s important to include as much information as possible to make an accurate assessment of how your business compares to other businesses. You need to gather information about potential competitors and their features, prices, quality of service, strengths and weaknesses, along with the components in analyzing competitors :

Feature matrix :

Discover all the features that each direct competitor’s product or service has.

Market share percentage :

This helps identify who the main competitors in your market are. Don’t exclude the bigger competitors entirely, as they have a lot to teach you about how to be successful in your industry.

Price :

Determine exactly how much competitors are costing and where they fall on the quantity or quality spectrum.

Marketing :

 What type of marketing strategy does each competitor apply? Research competitors’ websites, social media, their SEO strategy, their tagline and current marketing campaigns.

Differentiator :

What makes your competitors unique, and what do they advertise as their best qualities ?

Strength :

 Identify what your competitors are doing well and what is working for them. Do the reviews show that they have an excellent product ?

Weakness :

 Identify what each competitor could do better. Do they have a weak social media strategy? This information can give you a competitive advantage.

Geography :

See where your competitors are and the areas they serve.

Conclusion

Analyzing competitors is not to steal what they are doing, but to understand where your business is in the market and find new opportunities to make your product stand out. Finally, focusing on your customers and the gap between supply and demand will serve you far better than focusing on the competition. And that’s what competitor analysis is for – finding ways to better serve customers.

Also read other articles about Startup, business, innovation, and technology on the Ideanation website www.ideanation.id.