When planning your marketing and business strategies, it’s essential to recognize that you don’t operate in a vacuum. The goals you set and the process you adopt must comply with your competitors’ strategies. That’s the only way to stay one step ahead of the competition and perform the best. Without adopting such measures, you can quickly lose relevance in the business world. The best way to stay ahead of your game is by conducting a regular market analysis.
Market analysis or competitive research gives you immense insights into almost every strategy that your competitors use. You can use this data to capitalize on their weaknesses while incorporating their strengths in your plan. Competitive analysis is not a new trend in SEO. It’s been around for years without getting the attention it deserves. Business owners usually assume that competitive analysis will take up way too much of their time and money.
However, while that may have been the case once, things have significantly changed now. Nowadays, competitive analysis is essential if you want your business to adapt to the evolving marketplace consistently. As with everything, however, competitive analysis comes with its share of pros and cons. If you’re interested in learning whether your business can benefit from it, keep reading below.
Positive Aspects:
- Pros: Conduct fast and in-depth organic research
Organic research is one of the most critical areas to consider when it comes to competitive analysis. With organic research, you can learn more about the SEO techniques most commonly used by your competition. Organic SEO is vital if you want to capitalize on organic traffic to generate leads. If you wish your website to rank high without any paid ads, use competitor analysis tools to boost the traffic. These tools allow you to see the keywords used most often by your competitors, alongside the most successful forms of multimedia used. You can also see the top domains that you need to compete with and research their SEO strategies.
Organic traffic makes up a whopping 40% of all online revenue, so ensure that you take advantage of this tool. Additionally, organic research can tell you about market trends and your customer’s interests.
- Pros: Easily monitor the performance of brands in your niche
While it’s essential to keep track of your performance, it’s equally crucial that you know how well your competition is doing. You would imagine this to take hours upon hours of carefully stalking all the brands in your niche, but that isn’t the case. Competitive analysis can make the job incredibly easy and can give you detailed stats in a flash. Brand monitoring can allow you to see how well the top brands in your niche are doing by keeping track of ad campaigns and mentions. You can check the authority of the backlinks your competitors generate, as well as assessing how successfully they’re advertising in comparison to you.
- Pros: work on getting the best backlinks
Even newbies to SEO will know of the importance of backlinks in getting a high search engine ranking. Backlinks from high-authority domains are testimonials to your expertise in your niche, so they go a long way in boosting your ranking. Good-quality backlinks tell search engines that not only can they trust your content, but that it’s also highly relevant to the topic. If you’re having trouble building reliable backlinks, competitive research can help you out immensely.
The competitive analysis gives you a list of the best domains to target when you’re building backlinks. Additionally, you can compare your backlink profile with that of your competitors. It gives you a chance to learn more about the websites that sponsor your rivals, but not you.
Downsides:
- Cons: You can misinterpret data
Conducting a competitor analysis will give you an immense amount of data. Before conducting such in-depth research, it’s essential to consider what tool to use. After all, the data we collect is only as good as the tool we use. Without a reliable tool, not only will the information be faulty, but it can be challenging to interpret. At best, this means wasted time and money.
At worst, however, we can end up using this inaccurate data or misinterpreted data to make business decisions that do great harm. To ensure nothing of the sort happens, make sure you get a second opinion and ensure that your competitive analysis tool is the best one out there.
- Cons: Too much data can be overwhelming
Competitive analysis can give you a mountain of insightful data to help you improve your business. However, at times all this information can be incredibly overwhelming. Competitor analysis shows you the various segments in the market that your competitors advertise. It also shows you the areas you need to work on, such as PR or ad campaigns, building backlinks, and so on.
If you try to fill all the gaps at once, you can end up spreading yourself way too thinly. It can impact your business’s performance across the board. When interpreting data from any competitive analysis, make sure to consider your business capacity carefully. Instead of advertising to entire market segments at once, try starting with your target audience and work your way up.
Conclusion
A competitive analysis is your best bet at distinguishing yourself from your competition by working smartly and proactively. No matter how big or small your business is, you can always benefit from an in-depth survey of your market niche. Therefore, competitive analysis is a cornerstone of any businesses’ successful marketing strategy and is the best tool to expand your business.
If you work smartly and with the right tools, you can easily overcome this strategy’s few drawbacks. Furthermore, competitive analysis is even more useful for small businesses that are looking to expand. Every company has competition, and every company needs healthy competition to grow. When you carefully analyze your competitors, you learn just how much room you have to grow.