How to make a competitive analysis

Clarify all your doubts about competitive analysis. What is it for, how to do it and all the tools that will facilitate this process.

Performing a competitive analysis is a necessary operation for any business that wants to stay current in the market. In order to become the best, you need to beat the competition.

Knowing their strengths, characteristics and the resources they used to get where they are, will help you to know who you are dealing with. In addition, learning from the competition will give you tools to grow your brand.

In this article we will tell you the things you have keep an eye on when studying and analyzing your competitors. 

Get traffic data and keywords

There are different tools, both free and premium, that provide reports on web pages. The most popular free tool is Alexa.

Alexa is used to get current data about the competition. Just enter the name of any domain and you get information about the amount and origin of the traffic it receives, as well as average behavior data.

This website has a search engine in which the domain's data is entered to be analyzed. Once we do that, the site gives us a report with:

• Traffic information:
• The position of the site in a global ranking.
• The country that gives it the highest percentage of traffic.
• A graphic with traffic changes in the last quarter.
• A breakdown of the percentages of traffic it receives by country.
• The percentage of organic traffic.
• Average behavior data:
• Bounce rate.
• Page views by visitor.
• Average visit time.

As for keywords, the site provides us with a list of the 5 keywords that provide the most traffic to the website. Each with its respective contribution percentage.

As we mentioned above, the data Alexa provides will always be recent. If you want to do a more thorough inspection, you'll need to use another tool. To do this we can use the web pages Similar Web and Archive.org.

On Similar Web, we can find additional data like the website's total traffic. Archive.org has a section called Buyback Machine, here we can view past versions of the site to compare.

Check on social media traffic data

Another very interesting data that the results of Similar Web give us, is the traffic obtained by social media. In this section, the web page gives us a list of the social media accounts that generate the most traffic.

In this way, we can discover the social media accounts in which your competition generates more content and therefor invests more time and effort. With this information we can go to the social media accounts of our competitors and observe their behavior.

By analyzing the social media accounts of other brands, we can find new keywords and draw inspiration from the type of posts they share. In social media we can also discover the level of interactions that the brand has with its target audience and its reach.

Pay attention to technical matters

If we focus on investigating the technical developments of our competitors ' websites, we will be able to give ourselves an idea about which technologies are best used in projects similar to ours. 

In addition to getting to know the competition, we can also discover useful information about tools, strategies and suppliers for businesses like ours.

The most basic information we can obtain is with which content manager or IDE was used to build the website. By this we mean elements such as the home page, blogs, catalogs, etc. 

The tool that will find all this data in a fast way for us, is Built with. In addition to informing us about the resources used for each element of a web page, it also tells us if it invests in advertising or any analytical tools and the components they use.

If you want to go even deeper and know how any web page is made, you can resort to tools available in any browser: the element's inspector and the source code display.

When we use the option of "view source code" in Chrome, we will often see a combination of programming languages. Mostly HTML, which works with tags and CSS. 

On the other hand, the option “Inspect Element” allows us to know the code and behavior of the element that we choose. This allows us to see the SEO settings that our competitors use.

Do not be afraid to a professional for help

Performing a competitive analysis is not an easy task. As we explained in this article, we need to pay attention to numerous elements. 

If you are not completely sure that you can take the time to conduct a full study or that you do not have the ability to analyze the more complex parts of the process, don't worry.

Consulting a specialized professional for a competitive analysis, will allow you to streamline this operation, comply with areas that are beyond your capabilities and better understanding of the results you obtain.

Knowing the technical issues, traffic info and keywords used by the competition, will give you the advantage of learning from the example of others. Things like problem solving, efficient suppliers, will help you improve your perspective in terms of the actions you take in your Digital Marketing strategy.