Analyzing Your Online Competition

Competition research and analysis is only worthwhile to the extent that it’s a learning experience for you — and you take notes — every time you look at a competitor’s website.

Analyze your competitors’ sites from the point of view of your target audiences — put yourself in their shoes. This isn’t about what you think; it’s about what your customers think.

Your Three Roles — Researcher, Analyst, and Competitor

While you’re looking at your competitors' sites, you’re a researcher and then an analyst. Like an offensive coordinator preparing for next week's game, you get the facts, decide what they mean, and then make a plan.

Focused, unhurried, dispassionate competition analysis will give you the information you will need when you resume your role as a competitor while you're working on your own website.

How to Analyze Your Online Competition

1. Content Analysis

Ask yourself questions like these:

• Which of your competitors’ home pages are precisely and concisely focused on the essential information target audiences need — who, what, where, etc.?
• Is the content on the website genuinely helpful and reliable?
• Are any of them leaving out information that potential customers might need?
• Do any of their homepages require you to scroll down the page to find fundamental information?
• As you look through their websites, do you see any content that gives you ideas for your own site?

2. Targeted Search Term Analysis

Some small businesses seem to underestimate the importance of making careful choices about targeted search terms (“keywords”). When you plan your own site, be careful about how you choose search terms to target, and about how you target them.

This is an area where some misinformed people seem fully confident that they know what they’re doing — so be careful!

Make a list of the search terms your competitors are targeting. Consult this list of your competitors' targeted search terms when you’re working on your own site.

Your competitors are actually targeting a search term if they use it two or more times on their home page or other landing page.

Are they diluting the effect by targeting more than five search terms for a single page — their homepage or other "landing" page?

You might copy-and-paste each of your competitors’ title tags and two of their metatags (“description” and keywords”) into a Word document you can use when you plan your site.

The keywords metatag will tell you what terms they think they are targeting, although that metatag gives them hardly any benefit with the search engines. A quick analysis of the text on that page will tell you what they are actually targeting (if anything).

3. Benefits Analysis

Your detailed analysis of the benefits that each of your competitors claims or implies will be indispensable for your own planning, and is probably the most important part of your competition research and analysis.

• What specific benefits are mentioned or implied?
• Are any of your competitors persuasively demonstrating why their products and services are advantageous?

4. Graphic Design Analysis

Which of your competitors’ have sites with fresh, clean, appealing graphic design?

• Are any of their sites visually overwhelming, cluttered, or unnecessarily complicated?
• Do any of their sites look visually stale or dated, as if they were designed in 1997?
• Do their photographs and other images really help sell their products and services? Do they look professionally-produced?

5. Functionality Analysis

What kinds of forms, databases, and widgets do your competitors use on their sites?

• Do their forms ask for too much information — more than they need, more than some visitors may want to give?
• Can you sign up for a newsletter on their sites?
• Can you register for a special offer, a contest, or an event?
• Can you schedule an appointment or check service status?
• Are any of your competitors’ sites database-driven?
• Can you search the site or search any databases?
• People increasingly want to find information quickly; do your competitors allow their sites to be searched by keyword?
• Are these features actually helpful?
• Could they have been made more helpful?
• Do any of their websites make real-time contact easy — by instant messaging, business chat, or texting, for example?
• Would it make any difference if any of their features weren’t there?

6. Pricing Analysis

How do your competitors' prices compare with each other and with yours?

• If pricing is not available on your competitors’ websites, do you know or can you find out what they charge?
• Do you see any opportunities for you to compete on price while maintaining profitability?

7. Collaboration Analysis

The principles of social marketing on the Internet suggest that you should also be doing collaboration analysis as part of your competition research.

Can you see any opportunities for win-win collaboration with one or more of your competitors?

8. Overall Strategy Analysis

Evaluate each of your major competitors' overall Internet strategy:

• Is one of them clearly dominating the others?
• Do any of them seem to be particularly aggressive?
• Do any of them seem to be expanding the number of products or services they offer?
• Do any of them seem obviously committed to the regular addition of new and updated content to their sites?

Keep the Word document with your competition research notes handy, because you will want to update your research every couple of months.

Please call Allied Internet at 303-935-1820 or 1-800-935-1820 to discuss your online competition analysis needs and options. We are are almost always available Monday through Friday from 9:00 a.m. Eastern until 5:30 p.m. Pacific.