Tracking Your Competitors Online: What You Need to Know
Who cares what your competitors are doing?
There is a school of thought about entrepreneurship and innovation – just forge ahead with your own idea and don’t bother yourself with what your competitors are doing.
If you’re doing something better than them, they’ll be the ones who have to keep up with you! Right?
Sorry to say, but that’s a fairy tale.
Trying to run a competitive business with little or no idea about who you’re competing with is a recipe for failure. What you don’t know can literally put you out of business.
That’s why it’s important to include competitive analysis as a regular part of your business strategy planning. This brief guide covers the basics about how to build a digital analysis plan for tracking your competition.
What do I need to consider when scoping out the competition?
Get started by looking at your competitors’ online presence.
Collect links for all of the properties you can find so you can go back and analyze each of them:
Corporate website
Any microsites or subdomains
YouTube channels
Twitter accounts
Facebook pages and communities
LinkedIn page and groups
TikTok or Instagram accounts
Pinterest, Quora, Reddit or other less commonly adopted social media accounts
Start with the website
The primary corporate website is always the best place for you to begin to understand a competitor’s approach to the market.
Ask yourself some of the following questions:
How authoritative is the domain name?
How much organic (unpaid) traffic does the website generate?
How much paid traffic does the website generate?
What words or phrases are used to describe the company’s offers?
Is it easy to take action on offers or products?
How clean and appealing is the overall design of the website?
How complicated are the product or service offerings?
Is the website’s language customer-centric or laden with jargon?
What tone of voice does the website use?
What social media properties are linked?
Who links to their website (these are called backlinks)?
You may need to subscribe to a paid search analysis tool like Semrush, Serpstat, SpyFu or Ubersuggest. You may also need to work with specialized industry experts such as a digital strategist, SEO expert, user experience architect or data scientist to get at some of this information.
Once you’ve analyzed the primary website and attempted to answer the above questions, you move on to any standalone microsites, subdomains and online communities. Online communities are a bit of a special case. For these, unless you have created an account, you may or may not be able to see the discussions. If the site is public and open, you can glean a valuable understanding of your customer’s products and how your competitor’s top fans perceive their products or services. The downside is that public online communities are powerful drivers of SEO results, which may make it more difficult to compete with them.
If the online community is closed, you may still gain valuable insights by paying attention to how the company talks about their members and fans, why people should join, and what they’re likely to get out of participating.
How well does the company show up in search results?
Once you’ve looked directly at the primary website and other associated sites, turn your attention to Google itself. Try typing the competitor’s name into the search engine. What is the result of your search?
A website with healthy SEO will show sections or areas of the site with short summaries (teaser text). Teaser text should entice you to click on the result, so it needs to be customer-focused and suggest action.
If the copy text that Google has gleaned from the competitor’s website is mundane, that’s a good sign for you. And a call to do better with your site.
Have you checked how your own company’s website appears in search when you type in your company’s name?
Using a search analysis tool, you will want to do some more digging about the company. Try to learn:
The company’s most valuable keywords
Keywords that increased in page result ranks recently, especially those what are almost on page one results in Google
Keyword that have lost ranks recently
Your competitor’s top pages
Search tools like SpyFu can tell you the approximate amount of money a competitor is paying for search engine results and for which phrases.
How are your competitors using social media?
Now that you’ve looked at the websites and how search is perceiving a competing brand, it’s time to assess their social media game.
For each social media channel, ask the following questions:
Is the brand consistently expressed through logos, colors and cover images?
Are the social media posts on brand for the company?
What kinds of content do they post?
What kind of responses do they get on most posts, whether likes, comments or shares?
Who do they follow?
Who are their followers or connections?
How frequently do they post?
These questions will help you to identify areas of weakness that might be exploited in your own company’s approach to social media publishing. Their strongest posts may give you ideas about similar posts you might include in your content mix, including videos, carousels, infographics, audio, photography, contests, polls and more.
To fully assess and track the social media profiles of your competitors, you may need to subscribe to a paid social media listening tool (you can find a starting list of social listening tools in our blog about social media listening programs). These tools allow you to set up dashboards to track competitors, posting frequency and engagement levels over time.
Putting together a competitive intelligence program
Pulling together answers to the questions above might lead to deeper questions from your leadership team. A responsible, clear-eyed analysis takes time.
A caveat: what you find may not be surprising to your leadership.
It’s not uncommon to receive knowing nods from a CEO who feels that your findings merely confirm what they had expected. In these cases, it’s important to point out that basing assumptions about what a brand competitor seems to be doing today on anecdotes and assumptions from yesterday is risky.
Competitive intelligence work, whether assessing digital marketing or applied more broadly, must be approached as an ongoing program. Snapshot analyses are useful the moment they are taken, but they are almost immediately invalidated as the market changes.
Instead build a monthly set of checks that can be updated on a quarterly basis to detect changes in your primary brand competitors.
The insights you uncover should be shared with your executive leadership team at least once a year, more often if you’re in a highly competitive and/or unstable market.
Conclusion: It’s About Actionable Insights
Finally, as you’re putting together a pitch to develop a competitive analysis program for your organization, remember that its viability depends on whether you can infer actionable insights from the data.
Collecting competitor data is one thing, but by itself, it serves no useful purpose except to satisfy an interest about what “The Joneses” are up to this week.
Unless you take that information further to suggest an interpretation of a competitor’s approach and how your organization might improve on or out-maneuver them, it is unlikely the program will continue its funding much beyond its first year.
Kane Communications has devised and run ongoing competitive analysis programs for customers. If you’d like to discuss how we can help, contact us for a consultation today.
