To have successful digital marketing efforts, you need to master competitor analysis.

Competitor analysis is a process of diving into how your competitors have dealt with marketing challenges similar to yours, their strategy, and their efforts and get ideas on what worked and what hasn’t so you as a business will have a foundation of how you will plan and execute your own digital marketing strategy. All these are achievable by the use of different tools and techniques.

What to consider when doing competitor analysis?

Here are 6 fundamental elements of competitor analysis you should know:

Examine web traffic
The first one to look at is your competitor’s web traffic. You want to know how people discover your competitor’s website and where traffic comes from.

Also, you want to take note of the number of visitors they get in a specific period, how many unique visitors they have, visit duration, and even their bounce rate.

By getting these numbers, you will know which of your competitor’s pages are getting the most traffic and which is the most popular.

Evaluate backlinks
Backlinks are powerful boosters. They help build the authority of your website and improve your search engine rank. Thus, you must work on building your backlinks.

Backlinks are one of the things to consider when doing competitor analysis. You want to evaluate how your competitors build their backlinks and what sites they get them from.

With competitor analysis, you will be able to perform a backlink gap analysis that is to identify what domains are linking to the competitors that are not linking to yours.

Compare keywords
One of the best things about doing competitor analysis is getting to know what keywords your competitors use and which specific keywords they are trying to rank for.

As you already know, keywords are vital to your SEO. Your website and all your content should be based and focused on keywords that will help you reach your audience and rank your website.

With the help of competitor analysis tools, you will definitely be able to gather a list of keywords that you can draw ideas from.

Monitor social media
Social media takes a huge part in today’s digital marketing, therefore, you have to monitor your competitors’ social media activity as well.

By checking out their social media, you will know what social media platforms they use, how they position themselves, how they engage with their audience, how they run social media promotions, what content they post, and how they establish their brand.

By doing so, you will have ideas on what promotion strategy you can do for your brand that your competitors don’t do or have not done yet.

Get content ideas
Part of competitor analysis is content analysis where you see the list of topics from different pages of your competitor’s website.

This is where you can get content ideas by creating a list of all their high-performing content and then see what other content you can do out of them.

You can also create a list of their poor-performing topics for ideas and see how you can create more engaging and interesting content out of them.

Analyzing and understanding your competitors will help you position your brand better even if you are just starting or a small business owner. With the right tools and research, you can compete head-to-head with your competitors.