In order to achieve success online, you must outperform your competitors and in order to outperform your competitors you must understand what strategies they are using, what strategies are working for them, what strategies are not working for them, and what strategies they haven’t even tried yet that could give you and edge.
One of the greatest things about online marketing is the tremendous wealth of data points that are available to track the effectiveness of strategies and campaigns. There are tools available online that can tell you everything that you need to know in order to build a plan to outperform your competitors in every way. Using these tools, in this way, is a lot like taking a test and getting to look at the answers that have been submitted and graded from every other kid in the class. If you know where to find those answers, you can give yourself a great advantage.
In order to complete this competitive analysis, you will need to use a number of tools that will be referenced throughout this lesson. Most of them offer some sort of free trial that could get you through this analysis. However you will find that most of these tools can deliver fantastic ongoing value and are well worth the cost for ongoing memberships. Whether you keep them or not is up to you, but you will at least need to do the free trials in order to get through this very important exercise.
This exercise will get you as close as possible to being able to predict the future ROI for your online marketing efforts.
Before you get started make sure to download the CompetitiveAnalysisDataSheet.xlsx that goes along with this lesson. Download it here now, and open it immediately so we can get started.
Once you have the Competitive Analysis Workbook open, begin going through each of the following KPIs, use the suggested tools to retrieve the data on each competitor and enter the information into the data sheet as you go.
The number of different individual people that visited a site in the most recent month. It is also important to see the trend line for this statistic. This is one of the most powerful data points in determining if you want to include a competitor into your in depth competitive analysis or not. You should be looking for the 5-10 top competitors in terms of unique visitor traffic. You also want to look for competitors who are trending up in this statistic. If you see competitors that are trending down, or have seen a significant drop in traffic, consider that a warning. You can always look at more competitors later, but the top 5-10 should give you an idea of what it takes to be a dominant force in your niche.
Tool to identify Unique Visitors / mo: The best tool to identify this metric is Compete.com.This tool reports information for the top 1,000,000 websites online, and the information is incredible. They do this through aggregating data from numerous sources and utilizing awesome statistics and equations to present the data. The bigger the site, the better the data.
Compete.com is a paid tool, but it is one that will be very valuable to the competitive analysis and strategy creation process. (They offer a 24 hr free trial. Sign up, get through this competitive analysis and then cancel the tool within 24 hrs and you won’t have to pay. Of course you may want to keep it because the information is great!)
This is the total number of visits to your site in the most recent month. It is also important to see the trend for this statistic.
Tools to identify Visits / mo: Compete.com provides this data.
This gives you the average number of times each unique visitor comes back to your site each month.
How to get this data: This is the result of the following equation: (Visits / Unique Visitors)
What it means: When comparing 5-10 competitors you will find some sites have more visits than others. Typically, the higher this number the better job they are doing with user engagement.
The number of pages on your site that are viewed each month.
Tools to identify Pageviews / mo: Compete.com provides this data.
This is the average number of pages that are viewed during each visit to your site.
How to get this data: This is the result of the following equation: (Pageviews / Visits) What it means: Typically the higher the number of Average Pages Per Visit, the better the user engagement for the site. However, in order to draw a conclusion you must understand the conversion funnel and use of security protocols and sub-domains. For instance, if a site has a very short conversion funnel, it will naturally have less pageviews than a site with a longer conversion funnel. A site that quickly redirects engaged users to an https: version of the site or to a sub-domain, may not be actually reporting the correct number of pageviews. Still, from a high level this is a good metric and can lead you to learn some important things about your competitors.
This is the estimated amount of traffic your competitor got from Google Organic SERPs in the most recent month. A 2 year trend for this metric is also available.
How to get this data: SEMrush.com is an online data tool that offers this and numerous other invaluable types of data that we will use throughout the competitive analysis process. This is one tool that is definitely worth keeping. The PRO recurring plan is just $69.95 per month. This is one of the best values in its class. SEMrush.com constantly monitors Google SERPs for hundreds of thousands of keywords, then uses Google’s keyword search volume API and multiplies that by the average click through rate based off of each position 1-20 in the search results. This allows SEMrush.com to provide search engine traffic estimates based on keyword rankings.
What it means: Getting a lot of traffic from organic search results indicates that a site is doing a good job with SEO. Therefore, this is an important metric when finding competitors to learn from.
This is the number of keywords that your competitor is ranking for, in the top 20 results in Google SERPs. This is a This is a great way to get a quick understanding of what keywords are sending the most traffic to your competitor.
How to get this data: SEMrush.com provides this data. SEMrush.com constantly monitors Google SERPs for hundreds of thousands of keywords and stores data about the top 20 rankings for each keyword. This is an incredible resource.
What it means: No tool will be able to tell you every single long tail or obscure keyword that a site may be ranking for, however, this tool does a good job of identifying most, if not all, of the keywords that are consistently driving traffic to a website from Google’s Organic Search Results. A site that is ranking on the first two pages of Google’s SERPs for lots of keywords is obviously doing a good job with SEO, so we want to learn from the strengths of their strategies.
This is the number of keywords being targeted by a competitor’s Google AdWords campaign.
How to get this data: SEMrush.com provides this data.
What it means: Competitors who have a mature AdWords campaign, meaning that they have been spending more than a trivial amount of money for an extended period of time, are likely to have figured out which keywords drive the right type of traffic. For instance, some keywords will drive traffic that tends to have a higher conversion rate. In an AdWords campaign, because you are spending money per click, over time most companies will stop advertising for keywords and do not convert well, and put more money into keywords that have higher conversion rates. This is a great way to learn from your competitors, which keywords you should be targeting both organically and through advertising.
This is an estimate of how much traffic is being generated per month through a competitor’s Google AdWords campaigns.
How to get this data: SEMrush.com provides this data.
What it means: This metric will help you get a clearer picture of how dependent your competitors are on an AdWords campaign and how much traffic you could instantly get to your site if you were to replicate their AdWords campaign.
This is an estimate of the amount of money that your competitor spent on their AdWords search campaign in the most recent month.
How to get this data: SEMrush.com provides this data.
What it means: This gives you a clear understanding of what type of budget your competitor is putting toward their Google Search AdWords campaign, and gives you a glimpse of what can be accomplished with an advertising budget through AdWords.
This tells you how much money it cost for each visitor who came to the site through the Google AdWords search campaigns, on average.
How to get this data: This data is the result of the equation: Ads Traffic / Estimated Ad Spend
What it means: Of course when you look at an AdWords account at the campaign level, each campaign may have very different cost per click, but this is a high level overview that allows you to begin considering if AdWords can be a profitable channel.
This is an estimate of how much money is being spent in AdWords for each actual conversion.
How to get this data: In order to estimate this number, you must have two data points that no third party tool can give you. Hopefully you already have these data points for your own business because they are two of the most important data points that you must have in order to ensure that your online paid advertising will be a success. Those metrics are: Gross Revenue Per Sale & Conversion Rate.
This number may also vary widely based on different products / services or campaigns. However, in order to guarantee that your advertising campaigns produce positive ROI, you have to know what this number is and watch it closely. Typically 3.5% is a very standard industry norm for online advertising. Of course this varies for every industry, product, service and offer. In some industries 1% is a great conversion rate, in others 5% is normal. Anything above that is outstanding in any industry.
Once you have these data points, then you divide 100 by your conversion rate. For instance if your conversion rate was 3.5% then the equation would be: 100 / 3.5 = 28.5. Then you multiple that number (the 28.5 in this example) by your spend per visitor.
For instance, if your spend per visitor was $10, and your conversion rate is 3.5%, then the equation would be ($10 x 28.5 = $285) your Cost per Conversion would be $285.
What it means: If you know your Gross Revenue Per Sale, then you can now determine if replicating your competitors AdCampaign would yield positive ROI. In the example above, your net revenue per sale would have to be more than $285 in order for you to expect a positive ROI from replicating your competitors campaign. However, you must also keep in mind that the numbers produced through this system tend to be much higher than what your competitor is actually spending. This is true for two important reasons. First, this data does not come from your competitors actual AdWords account, it has all be aggregated by various third party tools and those tools typically yield results that over estimate spend. Second and more importantly, these numbers are averages and in an AdWords campaign your CPC, Clickthrough and Conversion Rates will be very different from one campaign to the next. Therefore, if this metric tells you that replicating your competitors AdWords campaign could likely yield positive ROI, then it is likely that a well run AdWords campaign could produce much better ROI than predicted by this exercise.
Direct Traffic is the number of visits a website gets from people that go directly to the website and do not use a search engine to find it. Referring Traffic is the number of visitors that get to a site by clicking on a link from another site.
How to get this data: Unfortunately, outside of gaining access to your competitors installed Analytics tool, no third party tool can tell you how many direct visitors a competitor gets, or how many referring visitors. However, based on that data that we have already collected through Compete.com and SEMrush.com we are able to get a good estimate of this number.
The way to do this is by starting with the number of Visits (from Compete.com) and subtracting the SE Traffic number (from SEMrush.com) and then subtracting the Ads Traffic number (from SEMrush.com). The number that is left over is an estimate of the combined Direct and Referring Traffic.
What it means: If your competitor is a well recognized brand and/or they engage in a significant amount of offline marketing, then the direct traffic number may be high. You can get a feel for this by checking Google’s keyword tool for your competitors brand name, or homepage URL. A lot of people use Google even when they already know the exact URL. So, if the Google search volume is high for their URL, then you know that the direct traffic is high.
However, if the estimate of Direct and Referral traffic is high, and the Google search volume for their homepage URL is low, then it is likely that their referral traffic is high. Another clue to their referral traffic would be by running linking reports, which we will get to very soon.
This is the total number of pages of a given website.
How to get this data: There are two tools that can be used to get this data.
- Google Search Modifier: Use Google to search for the following: “site:website.com” will return all of the pages for that site that Google has indexed. This typically will not include every page that actually exists on the site, but it is good information for our purposes.
- https://ahrefs.com/seo-reports/ You should have already signed up for an account at https://ahrefs.com/pricing-plans.php a minimum of the Professional level will be necessary to complete this competitive analysis. Use the SEO report. It will perform a site crawl up to 50,000 pages.
- http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/ This tool will give you essentially the same data as the SEO report from ahrefs.com, but the free version of the tool is limited to only 500 pages crawled and does not include “no index” pages that may be hiding things like customer pages that your competitor doesn’t want search engines to crawl. However, if you get the paid version of this tool for 99 euros per year, then the page crawl limit is removed and you can spider the entire site, even the “no index” pages.
What it means: This report can tell you an incredible amount about your competitors. It will give you their URL structures for every page, the page Title, Description, Keywords, Heading Tags, Canonical Tag, Word Count, Inbound Links, Outbound Links, and more.
This is the number of other websites that are linking back to your site. Each website is only counted once. So, if a site is linking to you 300 times throughout their site, that site will only be counted once in this metric.
How to get this data: There are two great tools that can give you this info.
- http://ahrefs.com site explorer. (I hope you have an account by now. Note: We do not have an affiliate relationship with them. It’s just a great tool. Especially for checking backlinks of your competitors.
- OpenSiteExplorer.org This tool is a part of the Moz.com platform. If you intend to be a good online marketer, Moz.com is absolutely essential. Not only does Moz.com put out a wealth of amazing marketing insight based on testing and analysis, they have one of the best SEO tool suites available, and are very reasonably priced. Get an account at Moz.com now. Then go to OpenSiteExplorer.org, enter your competitors information and get ready to be impressed!
This is the number of .gov domains that are linking to your competitor. Backlinks from .gov domains are thought to carry more weight than other domains because you typically must earn them, not purchase them or get them through easy link building tactics. Also, Government organizations typically cannot recommend shady companies (OK, I’m laughing right now at having typed that last sentence…) But, that is actually the real reason that links from .gov domains indicate trust.
How to get this data: ahrefs.com site explorer.
What it means: If your competitors have a lot of .gov links, then you should look into those links and figure out their angle. It could be a traffic and revenue driver that you could replicate. If they have no .gov links, then that is a weakness and you have an opportunity to outperform them. However, if also may indicate that .gov links are difficult to get in your industry.
This is the number of domains linking to the site from educational organizations. Most of what was written above for .gov domains, applies here.
This is the number of different IP addresses that are linking to your site. This may be a significantly smaller number than the total linking domains.
How to get this data: ahrefs.com site explorer.
What it means: This is one of the metrics that Google uses to figure out if you are participating in some well known link schemes. For instance, if you own a bunch of domain names, and you use those to launch a bunch of micro-sites that link back to your main site… that is a link scheme that is against Google’s guidelines. So, if one of your competitors has a lot of different domains linking to their site from a small number of IP addresses… then you want to know that before you try to replicate their backlink profile… because they will likely get penalized for it at some point, and you don’t want to replicate their problems.
A sub net is a sub-network of a larger network of IP addresses.
How to get this data: ahrefs.com site explorer.
What it means: This is used for the same purpose as the number of IPs metric. You get the data in the same way and it means roughly the same thing. But it is a different data point because a sub-net is basically a network of IP addresses. So, when looking at a competitors backlink stats, this number is typically smaller than the number of IPs, which is typically smaller than the number of Domains… but if the step down from one stat to the next represents a significant % of your competitors overall links… that clearly indicates something fishy with their backlinks.
This is the total number of links pointing to a website. If the site is getting 300 links from one other website, all 300 of those links will be counted.
How to get this data: ahrefs.com site explorer.
What it means: This gives you one way to view your competitors backlink profile and wrap your mind around how much work it will take in order to replicate or create a similar backlink profile for your site. Keep in mind, when it comes to linking, quality and relevance are far more important than just the quantity of backlinks, but this is a great KPI to give you some perspective.
This is just a statistical average of how many links a website is getting from each domain that is linking to them.
How to get this data: This data is the result of an equation: Linking Domains / Total Links
What it means: While this is a sloppy way to look at this metric, if you are looking at a group of 5-20 competitors, and each competitor has a vastly different set of numbers in the various link KPIs, this gives you an average that you can easily compare. The higher this number, the more likely that your competitor has some fishy link building strategies.
This is the number of text links pointing to a website.
How to get this data: ahrefs.com site explorer
What it means: Text links are what they sound like… hypertext links that come from actual written text. Not pictures, not from form buttons.
The number of links pointing to a website that have the “no follow” tag associated with them.
How to get this data: ahrefs.com site explorer
What it means: The “no follow” tag is supposed to be used to indicate advertising links. The idea behind “no follow” tags is that they do not pass “link juice” so you will get neither an SEO benefit from Google, nor a penalty from Google for “no follow” links. It is also thought that a healthy, popular, organically relevant and important website will naturally have some “no follow” links pointing to it.
This is the number of links pointing to web pages that have been redirected to your competitors website.
How to get this data: ahrefs.com site explorer
What it means: This metric can sometimes be used to identify the evolution in your competitors web strategy. If your competitor doesn’t have many redirect links, you probably don’t need to look into it further, however if they do have a lot, you should check them out in both the SEO site crawl and try to figure out what happened and why so many pages had to be redirected.
This is the number of images that are being used as links to your competitors site.
How to get this data: ahrefs.com site explorer
What it means: A high number here can give you some great insight into your competitors content marketing, social and other strategies. If your competitors have high numbers here, then you will want to seek out those links in the backlink report, follow those links and figure out the strategy behind it.
This is the number of links to a website that are coming from forms.
How to get this data: ahrefs.com site explorer
What it means: This was a popular strategy in the mid 2000’s and some companies still use it, even though these types of links are now against Google’s guidelines. The strategy was to build a widget of some sort, and the widget would include a link or links back to your website. A good widget, handed to a large open source CMS community could result in tons of backlinks. However, this is also used in various affiliate marketing campaigns. It’s actually still a really great strategy, and if your competitors are using it, you should definitely look into it… but make sure to add the “no follow” tag on those links so you don’t get penalized by Google.
This is the number of .gov links pointing to a site. The previous .gov metric was the number of .gov domains, this is the actual number of links. For instance, you could have one .gov domain pointing 10 different links. All 10 of those links would be counted here.
How to get this data: ahrefs.com site explorer
What it means: If your competitors have a lot of these type of links, you will want to look at them and adopt a similar strategy. If they do not have a lot of .gov links, try to figure out how to get some and outperform them in this metric.
This is the total number of links coming from .edu sites. The same information from .gov links above applies here.
How to get this data: ahrefs.com site explorer
What it means: If your competitors have a lot of these type of links, you will want to look at them and adopt a similar strategy. If they do not have a lot of .edu links, try to figure out how to get some and outperform them in this metric.
PageRank is an outdated metric because Google no longer provides PageRank updates and has indicated that they will no longer support PageRank in the future.
TrustRank is a metric that is the result of many different factors that may indicate the legitimacy and trust worthiness of a website.
How to get this data: http://www.seomastering.com/trust-rank-checker.php this is a free tool that gives some interesting data, including TrustRank.
What it means: If your site has a high TrustRank, it will be easier for you to achieve top rankings in the SERPs.
Domain Authority is a metric created by Moz.com that produces a score for websites that is their own proprietary approximation of PageRank and TrustRank.
How to get this data: http://OpenSiteExplorer.com
What it means: This is a great metric for predicting how easy your site will be able to outrank a competitor for similar content.
This is the number of times that the homepage of a website has been shared on Facebook.
How to get this data: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ or https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/
What it means: Search engines are using this metric to indicate a positive user experience, quality and trust.
The number of times the homepage of a site has been liked for Facebook.
How to get this data: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ or https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/
What it means: Search engines are using this metric to indicate a positive user experience, quality and trust.
The number of times the homepage of a site has been shared on Twitter.
How to get this data: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ or https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/
What it means: Search engines are using this metric to indicate a positive user experience, quality and trust.
The number of times the homepage of a site has been +1’d on Twitter.
How to get this data: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ or https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/
What it means: Google is placing significant emphasis on this metric to indicate a positive user experience, quality and trust.
Indicates how well your competitors have integrated social sharing to their onsite strategy.
How to get this data: This is the result of adding together the previous four metrics.
What it means: This is a cumulative metric that gives a quick way to evaluate which competitors are doing the best job overall.
This is the number of times a competitor’s actual Facebook page has been liked by people on Facebook
How to get this data: Facebook. Go to your competitors FB page.
What it means: This is an indicator of popularity and online engagement. It can show you how active your competitors are on Facebook and whether social is a strength you must live up to, or a weakness you can exploit.
The number of followers a competitor has on their Twitter account.
How to get this data: Twitter.
What it means: An indicator of popularity and how well your competitors have integrated Twitter into their social strategy.
The number of people following your competitor on Google+.
How to get this data: Google+.
What it means: An indicator of how much each competitor is actually using Google+. Because Google+ is so important, if you have a competitor that has strong engagement in this metric, you should follow them and try to replicate their success. If your competitors are not yet taking advantage of Google+, you can gain a significant advantage by leading the way.
The number of Followers on Pinterest.
How to get this data: Pinterest.
What it means: Pinterest is a network that is massively important in many industries and can drive a significant amount of traffic.
The number of LinkedIn Tier 1 connections for the company LinkedIn page.
How to get this data: LinkedIn.
What it means: LinkedIn is often the most important social network for B2B companies.
This is a cumulative total of the actual in network followers for each competitor.
How to get this data: This is the result of adding together the 5 metrics listed above.
What it means: This indicates how committed and successful each competitor is in the top social networks. It will quickly show you which competitors you can learn from and give you an idea of how committed you have to be to social in order to compete, or whether you have an opportunity to become a social leader in your niche.
This is an indicator of how many local business listing directories your competitor is correctly listed in.
How to get this data: Yext.com
What it means: Yext.com is a tool that works with all of the top local business listing directories and allows users to secure and manage enhanced profiles on the top 70+ local business listing directories.
This is a list of the identifiable technologies that are used in your competitors website.
How to get this data: This data is made available through a Google Chrome extension called Wappalyzer. Simply install the extension from: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wappalyzer/gppongmhjkpfnbhagpmjfkannfbllamg?hl=en Then go to your competitors site and click on the Wappalyzer icon at the top left of the browser window.
What it means: By identifying the technologies being used by your competitors you can better evaluate technologies that could help you succeed.
By spending time on each of your competitors websites, you can gain a lot of ideas about user experience, what information is being presented, how it is being presented, page layout, imagery, messaging, conversion strategies, and more. By performing a good user experience study on your biggest competitors you can help ensure that your own user engagement strategy will not fall short of what is already in the market. Hopefully, you will even figure out how to innovate and introduce exciting user experience improvements.
This is a measure of how long it takes for a webpage to load. Websites that load faster are preferred by search engines, especially for users accessing Google through mobile devices.
How to get this data: Google Chrome and Firefox both offer extensions for PageSpeed and YSlow.
What it means: These tools will tell you how fast the page is loading and what technical issues can be addressed to increase the speed. It is good to benchmark your top competitors average page loading times for important pages, and then make sure that your site can outperform them.
Now that you have a good idea about KPI's at the site level...
What About Individual Pages?
Next In the next lesson you will learn how to perform a quick SEO analysis on a specific page. This really comes in handy when you want to look at a particular page that is ranking really well for a specific keyword. So, let's look at how to