I’ll tell you the answer at once: to study and analyse them 😉 Investigating data about your competitors can give a basis to raise the position in the search results, to improve your website, and to grow the business in general. How and by using what instruments the owner of an online store may carry out such the analysis?
While analysing the competitors, the accuracy of the study plays the central role. The use of imprecise or outdated information will not only give you anything but may have an adverse impact on the dynamics of your website promotion. So it is necessary to develop a plan, use advanced services to collect and analyse the information and to interpret the results correctly. Let’s start it out!
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How to Build Analysis Plan for your website:
During the comprehensive analysis, you should take into account both your competitor rankings in the search results and examples of the successful ads. We advise building a research plan based on these objectives. In this case, there certainly will be the following points – challenges that you have to solve at every stage of the research:
- SEO Research: aims to identify the most successful competitors; identify the missed semantics; compare your performance with the most dangerous rivals; find the most popular pages of your competitors’ sites; identify keywords for which popular pages rank in the search results.
- PPC Research: aims to find the most active competitors in the PPC advertising market; compare yourself with them; analyse competitors’ ads; conduct competitive analysis on specific metrics.
SEO research of your competitors: step by step
To carry out such research, you need the SEO tool like Serpstat.
Just adding the name of your domain and passing to the appropriate section, you will get the full list of all the domains you compete with on the market. Select the most successful competitor by sorting each regarding the Visibility, and choose the best one according to the dynamics.
Pay attention to the Missing Keywords column. There you see the number of keywords that you don’t have in your semantics, unlike your competitor. Look through all of them by clicking on the appropriate symbol. You can download the list for the convenience of future work.
Now pass to Domain vs Domain section. Here you can set side-by-side competitors’ comparison, seeing their keywords in organic as well as paid Google search results.
Next, you need to analyse each of the major competitors to see which pages on the rival’s website are the most popular. Enter the desired competitor’s domain address in the search box, select the search engine and pass to the Top Pages section. To analyse the competitor’s pages by popularity, group the information by the level of potential traffic.
This research will give ideas on expanding the range of products, the implementation of new shares and chips.
Finally, you are passing to the Tree View section. Here you will find the information on the requests for which pages rank in the search results. Analyse queries that lead to the most attended pages from the previous section and add them to your semantics.
PPC research of your competitors: step by step
To understand which PPC advertisement most successfully promotes your competitors, you can also use Serpstat. Or some other alternative you prefer.
Go to the PPC Research module and select the Competitors section. It is similar to the section with the identical name of the SEO Research module. The difference is that these competitors are active on the PPC advertising market and missing keywords here dedicated to the PPC market.
Here you also can get the full list of missing keywords just clicking at the appropriate number. Use them for the future to create the steepest PPC campaign ever!
Domain vs. Domain section here is similar to the one in the SEO Research module. Compare yourself with the most dangerous competitors in the PPC and use the obtained information to investigate keywords you are missing in your PPC campaign.
In the Ad Examples section, you can examine competitors’ ads. Here you will find your competitor’s ads examples, all the keywords for which the ad ranks, the volume of these keywords and the estimated cost of a click.
Competitive analysis on specific metrics: step by step
Once you have chosen the most dangerous and most successful competitors in the SEO and PPC, it is necessary to examine them more detailed. That is because you’ve found the rivals on some criterion, which reflects just one aspect of the problem and ignores the others. Also, it is sometimes necessary to check a competitor for a variety of metrics in other search engines. So, how to do it?
Go to the Batch Analysis section and add the competitors you are interested about to the Domain List. Select the parameters for comparison and the search engines.
Export the data to a spreadsheet for further analysis.
PS- There you have it. A ready-made plan to snoop on the competition. Don’t pay too much attention to the other guys, but never miss a chance to find the data that can help you to make your business more successful.