7 Metrics to Help You Analyze Your Competitor’s Website
Business is a competitive process. While it is important to know your customers, it is also smart to know who your competitors are, what they are doing, their strengths and weaknesses.
There are several reasons why you might want to stalk your competitor’s website. Having a competitor in the same niche should keep you on your toes, wanting to do better than them; this way, you can attract a larger share of your niches’ target audience to your side. The help of a digital marketing agency will come in handy when analyzing your competitor’s website but start by observing the following seven metrics.
1. SEO strategy analysis
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy is something you definitely should consider tracking if you want your website to make headway on the seemingly endless web, where millions of websites keep churning out content every second. Strong competitors that rank high in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) have gained control over the SEO of their website and made it look very appealing to search engine crawlers (which are responsible for indexing a website for SERP). For this reason, it is vital to perform a comprehensive competitive SEO analysis of your competitor’s website. There are tools online available for that, to have a peek into their SEO strategies which you can adopt. Look out for the best forming SEO strategy of your competitors and implement it into yours.
2. Monitor marketing strategies
Marketing is an integral aspect of any business, and successful businesses have mastered the art of creating result-generating marketing strategies. Strong competitor’s in your brand’s niche are not strong by mistake or sheer luck. Rather it is a product of well thought out marketing strategies. Use available free or paid competitive analysis tools to discover marketing strategies that your competitors are using to drive traffic, increase leads, conversions and sales on their website. Track the kind of advertising channels they use a lot, their keywords they promote online to get paid traffic to their website (also known as paid search traffic), other search engine marketing strategies, and their display advertising (note how the graphic used are designed).
3. Monitor visitor behavioral pattern
A strong competitor in your brand’s niche is definitely going to have a good amount of traffic with visitors consistently trooping into the website on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. This is a clear indication that they are doing something right with their marketing and content. And there are several tools you can use to get the estimate of visitors trooping into their website. Take a step further to understand what these visitors are actually doing on your competitor’s website. Try to understand how long do they stay on the website, which links are they clicking the most, what is the average page view per visitor, what is the percentage of bounce rate. Also take note of the kind of content they use such as images, videos and also the layout. All these would help you make necessary adjustments on your website.
4. Track their traffic source
Tracking where your competitors receive traffic from can help you know where you can also throw your fishing net to get a net-breaking catch. If you are still unsure about how to drive the right traffic to your website (your main target audience), this is one of the easiest ways you can identify where they are and also draw them to your website as well. There are free and paid tools or software that you can use to the track best-forming traffic source of your competitor’s website.
5. Track performing keywords
There is always an ongoing secret battle with brands in the same niche for keywords that their target audience is frequently using. A lot of internet users rely heavily on search engines to help them navigate the web for helpful resources on what they are looking for. They are likely to use long tail keywords or short tail keywords when searching through these search engines. Your responsibility as someone concerned about out-ranking your competitors in search results is to discover what these possible keywords are and make use of it to your own advantage. Ensure that your website is proportionately saturated with such keywords so that it would get the attention of search engines and help you rank higher. There are competitive analysis tools that you can use to extract keywords in your competitor’s website as well as keywords that their website visitors search for. In addition, look out for keyword adverts that your competitor’s use to advertise on these search engines to generate paid organic visitors to their website.
6. Understand your customer demographics
Understanding who your customers are is an essential marketing strategy that can never go out of style. It would also be as relevant and relative if any brand must survive at all. The brand exists to meet a need, no matter how small or large, and that need, in most cases, will appeal to a sect. It is your responsibility as the business owner or someone working with the business, to understand everything possible that needs to be known about that target audience. Once you have marked your competitors, perform an in-depth analysis of the demographics of visitors on their website. This would also give you a clear insight about your target audience and their interests, since you share the same niche, and know how best to drive all marketing and content strategy towards acquiring your relevant target audience.
7. Monitor their content strategy
Content is an integral part of your website. With the right content, you attract more visitors to your website, encourage them to spend more time navigating through your website, increase leads, conversions and possibly make sales in the process. Look out for the kind of content on your competitor’s website as well as the layout that makes their site appealing. Strong competitors in your niche are also going to have a very strong content strategy for the brand, identify these strategies and adopt them on your website too.