30-second summary:
- There are ways to save and optimize your SEO budget, here’s how
- Start with creating an “at a glance” report comparing your competitors’ key metrics. Find interesting trends to look further into!
- Analyze and monitor your competitors’ online sentiment and customer satisfaction. How can you become better than your competitors?
- Identify your competitors’ marketing priorities by looking at their competitors’ PPC tactics. Note their branded keywords they are bidding on: what do they consider their competitors?
- Research your competitors’ branded questions by analyzing “People Also Ask” and monitoring tweeted questions from their customers and brand ambassadors
- Analyze your competitors’ social media marketing tactics: what can you learn from these and which should you avoid?
1. Competitors at a glance for domain analysis
You can never have just one competitor in the real world. In some niches, you’ll end up with ten or more competitors that need your attention. Where to start?
This is the section I usually start my competitive report with: competitors at a glance which is a chart letting me easily compare my competitors.
What should be included in this section?
This section includes any metrics that would allow you to spot some key trends:
- How new or old is this competitor?
- How many backlinks has your competitor managed to acquire?
- What’s their website traffic?
- How large is the website?
Seeing all these numbers side by side often allows you to see important niche patterns or spot some interesting cases to explore further. For example, you can identify a new competitor that nonetheless gets a lot of organic traffic. Or you can find a competitor with fewer backlinks that managed to build solid web visibility. These are both good cases to learn from.
Here’s an example