Competitors lurk at every step; in the Internet marketing niche, their density is maximum. Any company - both one that has already found its niche in the market and has streamlined online marketing processes, and one that is just planning to go online - will have to carefully analyze the activities of competitors in order to stay afloat and make a stable profit.

If we consider the role of competitive analysis in the overall scheme of e-marketing processes, then we need to think about it at the level of developing the Strategy.

This means that it makes sense to use such an analysis only after the company has clearly formulated its business goals and worked out its positioning and sales proposition. It is also important that responsible managers already have an understanding of how communication will take place with each of the segments target audience.

Only by bringing together all this marketing data can you develop a company's email marketing strategy. You need to understand that in Internet marketing there is not and cannot be a standard competitor study that would help every company. In each case, it is necessary to form an individual set of parameters to be studied. Let's look at the main ones.

So what can competitor research tell us?

• Positioning of competitors. It is necessary to understand what image they form among the target audience. In particular, we can find out:
• who is the target audience;
• how competitors present their product (product, service);
• What unique features do they focus on?
• Customer service. We can find out how competitors' customer service is structured and understand how to improve ours.
• Pricing policy and assortment. We can find out what competitors offer and how different options and prices vary.
• Competitors' website (points of contact). We can figure out how they involve the target audience in communication on the site, how they convert them into clients and fans of the brand. This also applies to other points of contact - groups on social networks, emails, blog, company pages in organization directories, etc.
• Internet marketing strategy. We can find out what tools competitors use and what budgets they invest in promotion.

Positioning of competitors. What to look for?

What are competitors focusing on? Examples of positioning types:

• Distinctive characteristics- “Our company operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”
• Focus on consumer benefits- “You will not only buy a roof from us, but we will professionally install it for you.”
• Unusual way use- "This mobile phone Can also work as a flashlight."
• For a narrow segment- “We only sell shoes for running.”
• Comparison with competitor“Unlike our competitors, we also offer a set of winter tires as a gift.”

There are other ways to classify, but it almost always comes down to choosing one or more elements of the business model and telling a compelling story about why the proposal is unusual in that particular aspect.

Positioning research is usually carried out by analyzing the website (and other touch points) of competitors and conducting mystery shopping.

Service analysis. What to look for?

Very often in competitive markets it is necessary to invest not so much in the number of attracted potential clients, how much in the quality of interaction with them. In this case, you can ensure that as many as possible are converted from potential clients into real ones. large quantity visitors. Therefore, it would be useful to analyze our colleagues in the workshop according to the following criteria:

• Speed ​​of response to contacting the company- how quickly they pick up the phone, respond to an application from the site, to order call back, sent email, etc.
• Do the specified conditions on the site correspond to real ones?- Is the product in stock, what is the cost and delivery conditions.
• Managers' communication style- are they polite, are they trying to solve the client’s problem or sell anything at any cost, do they keep their promises, etc.
• Compliance with work schedule- call 5 minutes before the start and end of the working day.
• Is CRM used?- try to place an order, introducing yourself as a buyer who has allegedly already placed an order, and citing the fact that there is no time or it is inconvenient to fill out the form on the site.
• Provision of service/delivery of goods- whether the promises given to the client were kept.

This research is carried out by a mystery shopper.

Assortment analysis and pricing policy. What to look for?

It is important to understand what your competitors sell and under what conditions. If this is a company that provides services and sells several products, then there is nothing complicated. But if this is e-commerce, then to carry out the analysis it is necessary to study the product matrix. Usually they check:

• List of trademarks.
• How many products and what categories are presented from each brand.
• Categories by which competitors segment their products - for example, for a gift store, segmentation can be used not only by brands, types of goods, but also by the occasion when this gift is relevant.
• The cost of the product and the reasoning behind the price, if it is higher than the market average.

Such an analysis is carried out by a marketer or with the help of a secret shopper on a competitor’s website (perhaps competitors do not display everything correctly on the site).

And may be relevant for online stores various scripts, allowing you to simultaneously collect information from many competitive sites. For this, trade aggregators such as Yandex.Market are used. You can use both ready-made scripts and scripts developed by programmers for the needs of the company.

You can also make test purchases from competitors, for example, once a month, and see what number is assigned to your order. Comparing the two numbers, we get the number of orders per month. Knowing the average bill for the industry, we can guess what the approximate turnover of competitors is. But, unfortunately, some people already know about such tricks and generate a unique order number every time.

Competitors' website. What to look for?

The website is the place where the final conversion of the target audience often occurs. Ideally, the client immediately buys the product/service he needs on the website. Or he contacts the company directly, and it is up to the managers to bring the deal to a victorious end.

What should you study on competitors' websites?

• Elements of Establishing Contact- telephone numbers, application forms, online consultant, etc.
• Mechanisms of engagement on the site- text content (articles, reviews, blog, news), graphic content (photos, instructions, infographics), video content (reviews, training videos, presentations), interactive elements (calculators, module for selecting wallpaper for a room, etc.) And so on.
• Trust Elements- photographs of employees, diplomas, letters of recommendation, customer reviews, etc.
• Possibility to recommend- integration with social networks, recommendations by mail, etc.
• Integration with external services.
• Everything that “stands out” from the general trend.

If your competitors have been using the Internet as a marketing channel for a long time, it is useful to find out how their website was modified, how their positioning, and the list of services and products changed. To do this, you can use the www.archive.org service, but, unfortunately, some sites are not included in this archive. You can also find out about changes on competitors’ websites using the service www.changedetect.com.

Where do they look for this information?

• Search engines. To find information that already exists in the search engine index, it is convenient to use the search engine aggregator www.nigma.ru. To obtain new information included in the search engine index Google systems, you can use the service www.google.ru/alerts.
• News aggregators- news.yandex.ru and news.google.com. Websites with reviews and feedback - market.yandex.ru, www.irecommend.ru, www.yell.ru and others.
• Social networks and blogs. For free search For mentions on Facebook and Twitter, you can use www.siteheart.com and www.tweetalarm.com. To analyze blogs - blogs.yandex.ru.
• There are paid professional systems for monitoring the activity of competitors in various in social networks- - search for information on industry portals.

Summarizing

You can't just do competitor research once - it should be a periodic marketing event. Depending on the business model, research can be conducted at different intervals. For example, daily - monitoring of competitors' prices for online stores, annually - research for narrowly focused products or services where there are few competitors.

Competitive research is not an end in itself. The main thing is to build an effective email marketing system, and research is just one of the marketing activities.

To obtain quality data, analyze it and output correct recommendations, research should be carried out by experienced specialists. Often they have their own developments and their own programs. And sometimes information obtained from various services without analysis by a specialist is not of high value.

It is important to remember that these studies will never provide a comprehensive picture of the actions of competitors, but they will allow us to understand the general direction of their movement.

Competitors are people too and don’t always do everything right, so you shouldn’t immediately implement the innovations they “spotted”: you need to pay more attention to this information and study it in detail. But you shouldn’t delay making a decision either.

Most likely, while you are reading this article, there is a competitor on your site, and he is studying you.

Analysis of competitors on the Internet is needed by almost any company: one that has already found its niche in the market, has streamlined online marketing processes, and is consistently making a profit, and one that is just planning to go online.

If we consider the role of this instrument In the general scheme of Internet marketing processes, the analysis of online competitors is at the level of strategy development. This means that it makes sense to use such an analysis only after the company has clearly formulated its business goals and worked out its positioning and sales proposition. It is also important that responsible managers already have an understanding of how communication will occur with each segment of the target audience.

Having already brought together all this marketing data, you can develop a company's email marketing strategy.

Let's return directly to the subject of discussion. You need to know that in Internet marketing there is no standard competitor research that would help every company. In each case, this is an individual set of parameters that are studied from competitors.

Let's look at the main ones. So what can competitor research tell us?

• Positioning of competitors- understand what image they form among the target audience. In particular, we can find out: who the target audience is, how competitors present their product (product or service), what unique features they focus on.
• How is customer service structured?- understand how you can make your service better.
• Pricing policy and assortment- what competitors offer, and how different the range of options and prices are.
• Competitors' website (points of contact)- how they involve the target audience on the website in communication, how they convert them into clients and fans of the brand. This also applies to other points of contact - groups on social networks, letters to e-mail, blog, company pages in organization directories.
• Internet Marketing Strategy- what tools competitors use, what budgets they invest in promotion.

Positioning of competitors. What to look for?

What are competitors focusing on? Examples of positioning types:

• Distinctive characteristics- “our company operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”
• Focus on benefits/solving customer problems- “if you buy a roof from us, we will professionally install it for free.”
• Unusual way to use- “this mobile phone can also work as a flashlight.”
• For a narrow segment- “our online store sells shoes only for running.”
• Comparison with competitor- “we also offer a set of winter tires as a gift, unlike our competitors.”

There are other ways to classify positioning, but it almost always comes down to us choosing one or more elements of our business model and communicating to the client why we are unusual in that particular aspect.

Positioning research is usually carried out by analyzing the website (and other touch points) of competitors and conducting mystery shopping.

Service analysis. What to look for?

Very often in competitive markets it is necessary to invest not so much in the number of potential customers attracted, but in the quality of interaction with them. In this case, you can ensure that as many visitors as possible turn from potential clients into real clients. Therefore, it would be useful to analyze our colleagues in the workshop according to the following criteria:

• Speed ​​of response to contacting the company- how quickly they pick up the phone, respond to a request from the website, to order a call back, sent by email.
• Do the conditions indicated on the website correspond to real ones?- Is the product in stock, what is the cost and delivery conditions.
• Managers' communication style- Are they polite, are they trying to solve the client’s problem or sell anything at any cost, do they keep their promises.
• Compliance with work schedule- call 5 minutes before the start and end of the working day.
• Is CRM used?- try to place an order, introducing yourself as a buyer who has allegedly already placed an order and citing the fact that there is no time or it is inconvenient to fill out the form on the site.
• Provision of service/delivery of goods- whether the promises given to the client were kept.

This research is carried out by a mystery shopper.

Assortment analysis and pricing policy. What to look for?

It is important to understand what your competitors sell and under what conditions. If this is a company that provides services and sells several products, then there is nothing complicated. But if this is e-commerce, then to carry out the analysis it is necessary to study their product matrix. Usually they check:

• list of trademarks;
• how many and what categories of products are represented from each brand;
• categories by which competitors segment their products- for example, for a gift shop, segmentation can be used not only by brands, types of goods, but also by the occasion when this gift is relevant;
• cost of goods and justification for the price if it is higher than the market average.

Such an analysis is carried out by a marketer on a competitor’s website or with the help of a secret shopper (perhaps competitors do not display everything correctly on the website).

And for online stores, various scripts may be relevant that allow you to simultaneously collect information from many competitive sites. For this, trade aggregators such as Yandex.Market are used. Use ready-made scripts or scripts specially developed by programmers for the needs of the company.

You can also make test purchases from competitors, for example once a month, and see what number is assigned to your order. Comparing the two numbers, we get the number of orders per month. Knowing the average bill for the industry, we can guess what the approximate turnover of competitors is. But, unfortunately, some people already know about such tricks and generate a unique order number every time.

The website is the place where the final conversion of the target audience often occurs. Ideally, the client immediately purchases the desired product or service on the website. Or he contacts the company, and then it’s up to the managers to bring the deal to a victorious conclusion.

What should you study on competitors' websites?

• Elements of Establishing Contact- telephone numbers, application forms, online consultant.
• The mechanism of engagement on the site- text content (articles, reviews, blog, news), graphic content (photos, instructions, infographics), video content (reviews, training videos, presentations), interactive elements (calculators, module for selecting wallpaper for a room).
• Website and personal account functionality.
• Trust Elements- photographs of employees, diplomas, letters of recommendation, customer reviews.
• Possibility to recommend- integration with social networks, recommendation by mail.
• Integration with external services.
• Everything that “stands out” from the general trend.

If your competitors have been using the Internet as a marketing channel for a long time, it is useful to find out how their website was modified, how the positioning, and the list of services and products changed. To do this, you can use the www.archive.org service, but, unfortunately, some sites are not included in this archive. You can also find out about changes on competitors’ websites using the service www.changedetect.com.

Internet marketing strategy. What to look for?

Knowing how competitors convert their target audience, it would be useful to know what channels they use to attract the target audience.

What can you learn about our competitors?

• SEO promotion- there are a considerable number of useful tools and sites for analyzing competitors. They will allow you to find out the queries for which your competitors and positions are visible, what links they place and where, how much such placement costs, the quality of the text content and other data important for SEO. Here are some of these tools: Yazzle, Megaindex.ru, RDS-bar, Solomono, KeyCollector, PageWeight, Xenu.
• Contextual advertising. Useful competitor analysis service in contextual advertising- www.advse.ru. The service www.spywords.ru deserves a special mention, allowing you to analyze competitors both from the point of view of contextual advertising and from the point of view of promotion in search engines.
• Email Marketing- in order to understand what content colleagues send to the target audience, it is necessary to analyze their mailing list. If this is an online store, then by making a test purchase, you can track the algorithm for sending letters and their content. It is also useful to request commercial proposals and see how letters, commercial proposals, and presentations are formatted.

• PR activities. Here we first need to understand what information we will be looking for. Usually searched by company name, trademark, brand, product, service (in all languages, with typos, abbreviations). They also search by website address and other contact information (phone numbers, emails) and by the names of key company employees.

Where to look for information?

• Search engines- it is convenient to use the search engine aggregator www.nigma.ru to find information that already exists in the search engine index. To obtain new information included in the Google search engine index, you can use the service https://www.google.ru/alerts.
• News aggregators- https://news.yandex.ru/ and https://news.google.com/.
• Sites with reviews and testimonials- market.yandex.ru, www.irecommend.ru, www.yell.ru and others.
• Social networks and blogs- To search for mentions on Facebook and Twitter for free, you can use www.siteheart.com and www.tweetalarm.com. To analyze blogs – blogs.yandex.ru. There are paid professional systems for analyzing competitors on social networks - www.youscan.ru, www.iqbuzz.ru, www.babkee.ru and others. It also makes sense to be friends with your colleagues on social networks in order to keep abreast of various industry events and successes colleagues and the appearance of other useful information. To search for colleagues on social networks, it is convenient to use the service www.people.yandex.ru.
• Video channels- search for those on www.youtube.com, www.rutube.ru and similar.
• Photo services- search for information in www.instagram.com, www.flickr.com, www.pinterest.com, fotki.yandex.ru and similar.
• Vacancies and employer reviews- analysis of vacancies on www.hh.ru, www.rabota.ru and others. Search for reviews from employees on www.orabote.net and similar.
• Articles and news on thematic portals- searching for information on industry portals.

Now let’s look at examples to see how useful marketing research on the Internet can be for a company.

Case 1

Client- Russian domain registrar and hosting provider.

What was studied and what was discovered:

• An analysis of the services offered by colleagues in Russia and abroad showed that the company can help clients solve related problems on the Internet, in addition to domain registration and hosting.
• Based on research and usability testing, new sections were added to the site for different representatives of the target audience, and new functions were also added to the site and personal account.
• The core of search queries has been expanded for promotion in search engines and for contextual ones advertising campaigns.
• Work on other activities has been adjusted - PR, SMM, media advertising.

The data obtained allowed us to improve the company’s Internet marketing and increase sales.

Case 2

Client- online store of building materials.

• An analysis of competitors' advertising was carried out. Advertising channels were identified that were practically not used by competitors.
• The product matrix has been expanded.
• The database of search queries for SEO and context has been expanded.
• The work schedule has been changed.
• The site has been modernized.
• The company's customer retention policy has been developed.

The result is an increase in the company's profit due to repeat sales and attracting new customers.

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Case 3

Client is a Russian siding manufacturer operating in the b2b segment.

What was studied and what changed:

• Changing the promotion strategy, connecting new online marketing tools.
• Selection of the most complete semantics for the industry.
• Adjustment of contextual advertising campaigns.
• A new approach to working with dealers.

As a result, sales are growing due to an increase in the number of applications from new dealers (2 times) and adjustments to work with current dealers.

To summarize, I would like to draw attention to the following points:

• You can’t just go out and do competitor research once. This should be a periodic marketing event. Depending on the business model, research on some aspects may be carried out at different intervals. For example, daily – monitoring of competitors’ prices for online stores, annually – research for narrowly focused products or services where there are few competitors.

• In order to obtain high-quality data, analyze and derive correct recommendations based on it, experienced specialists must conduct research. Often specialists have their own developments and their own programs. In some cases, without a specialist, the information obtained from various services is not of high value.

• It is important to remember that these studies will never provide a 100% picture of all competitors’ actions, but will allow us to formulate a general vector of their movement.

• Competitors are people too and don’t always do everything right, so you shouldn’t rush to immediately implement innovations “seen” by your competitors, but you need to pay more attention to this information and study it in more detail. But you shouldn’t delay making a decision either.

• Competitive research is not an end in itself. The main thing is to build an effective email marketing system, and research is just one of the marketing activities.

• Most likely, while you are reading this article, there is a competitor on your site, and he is studying you :)

If you are faced with the task of conducting a competitor analysis, we recommend watching Andrey Gavrikov’s webinar “ Analysis of competitors in online business ».

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Internet marketing is a highly competitive environment. I know some agencies where employees also work on holidays, when the whole country is on vacation. While everyone is having fun and hanging out, the Internet is changing. Yesterday your site was in the top of Google, and today the page has dropped down 20 positions.

The rule of a good website: be useful to a simple user. This is exactly what search engines call for. You will have to take care of the design, site loading speed and content quality - giving readers only the latest and most relevant information.

Website optimization - a game of dark room. You do everything you can, but you cannot predict in advance what exactly will shoot. This is fine. Problems arise when positions don't grow, traffic doesn't increase, and sales fall. You think: “I think I’ve done everything, the portal works great, what else can be done?”

You can spy on your competitors. On our blog we often write: “look at what your opponent is doing”, “analyze your competitors”. And here is a guide on how to analyze your opponent’s website. Let's figure out why analyze opponents, what tools to use and how to interpret the results.

Why analyze your competitors?

Every internet marketer understands that working on a website is a long and painstaking task. A person will see real benefit if they read material on your website that they have never seen anywhere else before. The most effective way is to work on the portal yourself.

You write your own articles, make your own videos. Conduct research that will tell the audience about useful trends, create infographics that will tell the user complex material at a glance.

After analyzing your competitor's website, you:

• understand what he does better;
• evaluate what you are doing better;
• find new ideas to implement on your website;
• Look at the tricks of Internet promotion that are not on the surface.

What to analyze first:

• link profile;
• traffic to a competitive site;
• semantic core;
• quality of content;
• usability and design;
• paid traffic.

Competitor Analysis Tools

SEMrush

The service allows you to almost completely analyze your competitor’s promotion strategy.

You can upload traffic reports to a competitor’s website, to individual pages, and get a semantic core. You can even find out which third-party sites your competitor advertises on and how they manage their social networks.

Convenience of the service: after analyzing the semantic core, the tool will automatically select keys with a lower level of competition.

The service is paid. The minimum tariff is $99 per month.

What can be analyzed:

• traffic;

Majestic Site Explorer

The tool checks the link profile of the domain. You will find out how much the site has external links, on what domains, how many visitors. You can compare several sites at once (no more than 5 at a time).

In addition to links, you can organize a search using keywords.

What can be analyzed:

• link profile;
• traffic;
• domain rating.

LinkPad

A similar Russian tool that you can use to analyze the link profile of a competitor’s website.

There are free and paid versions. In the first case, optimizers have doubts about the completeness of the information. One way or another, you will learn everything about competitors' links - download the entire link profile with referring domains.

What can be analyzed:

• link profile;
• type of backlinks;
• referring domains.

SpyWords

Available reports:

• paid traffic to a competitor’s website;
• requests in advertising campaigns;
• ad positions;
• advertising texts.

In the service, you can analyze either an individual competitor and find out everything: queries used, approximate budget, traffic to the site. Another option is automatic key collection. The tool selects relevant keywords and determines which ones are the most effective for use in advertising.

What can be analyzed:

• paid traffic.

Search Metrics

Analyzes content and shows how much traffic a particular request potentially brings to the site.

You can draw conclusions about what your competitors' audiences like and adjust your content strategy.

You can also analyze other website performance indicators - cost per click in contextual advertising, link profile report and audience activity on social networks.

What can be analyzed:

• traffic;
• paid traffic;
• audience engagement metrics on social networks.

Budget forecaster

This is a service from Yandex that allows you to understand how much money you need to spend on advertising. You enter queries for which you plan to display ads, and the algorithm automatically calculates the predicted indicators.

You can parse the keys by which competitors display their ads, enter them into the Forecaster and calculate the approximate cost of a competitor’s online advertising. The tool will also show you competing ads based on the words you enter.

What can be analyzed:

• contextual advertising budget;
• geotargeting of target audience.

Monitor Backlinks

• link type - nofollow, meta follow, meta noindex, not found;
• anchor text;
• status of the page and resource in the Google index;
• number of links on social networks.

What can be analyzed:

• link profile;
• link status;
• activity on social networks.

SerpStat

The tool is suitable for both auditing your website and searching and analyzing competitors.

You can not only collect suitable keywords for your articles and advertising campaigns, but also find out which queries are in the top search results - therefore, find competitors.

A separate opportunity is market research. You will recognize the undisputed leaders of the niche (in local or global search) and understand what you can do to become just as cool.

In addition, you can order a site audit. It’s good to look at your competitors, but when your own website has a lot of errors, you need to start promoting by correcting them. Otherwise, no service can achieve superiority.

What can be analyzed:

• traffic;
• content;

Ahrefs Site Explorer

The service will allow you to find out everything about traffic to a competitive resource. You will be able to analyze traffic to pages, understand which materials attract the most visitors. The service will analyze keywords and will tell you which ones you should use for your portal.

You will also find out the details of the resource’s link profile - how many linking domains there are, what their authority is.

What can be analyzed:

• traffic;
• link profile.

WooRank

The service analyzes over 70 kpi of the portal. You can analyze your own, or you can find out more about your competitor.

A distinctive feature is comparative analysis. You can find out about the traffic, keywords and conversion of several competing portals at once and compare your site with them.

What can be analyzed:

• engagement metrics;
• traffic;
• link profile.

WebsiteReport

Russian-language service for analyzing your own website and monitoring competitors.

Automatically finds competing portals and provides statistics on where competitors are better than you. Based on this data, you can correct errors in the portal’s operation and get ahead of your rivals.

What can be analyzed:

• technical operation of the site;
• positions in contextual advertising;

PR-CY

The tool is designed to analyze your own website. However, you can compare your site with a competing portal.

The parameters of traffic from open sources, activity on social networks - engagement and sharing of posts, domain age, and the presence of micro markup are compared.

What can be analyzed:

• attendance metrics;
• activity on social networks;
• technical parameters of the domain.

SeoPult

Analyzes your website and compares it with top competitors. Provides information about page meta tags, key phrases, and the number of words on the page.

Useful if your site is not yet in the top. You will know which pages you will be competing with.

What can be analyzed:

• metadata;
• quality of content.

Marketing Grader

Conducts a simple analysis of the site. If you don't have time to bother with paid services, but you need to quickly understand the big picture of what’s going on with your opponent’s site (or yours, why not?), then this service is what you need.

He analyzes the main parameters of the site, evaluates them and gives recommendations on what needs to be done to promote on the Internet. The service is designed to analyze your own website, but no one is stopping you from entering the address of a competitive portal.

What can be analyzed:

• technical operation of the portal;
• usability and design.

RDS bar

This extension will help you skim through the pages of the site you are interested in and collect initial information. The tool is available for all browsers.

You'll know when specific page got into the search engine index, what is the regionality of the domain, its age, how meta tags are written.

The extension aggregates Linkpad and Alexa data and provides information about resource traffic.

What can be analyzed:

• attendance metrics;
• technical features of the site;
• link profile;
• quality of content.

The Wayback Machine

The site operates on the basis of a web archive. You will find out what your competitor's website looked like before. Accordingly, by tracking design changes and using services like SimilarWeb, you can understand how a design change affected conversions.

The information comes to you in the form of screenshots.

What can be analyzed:

• history of site changes;
• usability and design.

AdvOdka

The service provides reports on queries in the top 20, the frequency of which is higher than 0. Reports are available only for Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Despite the fact that you only see statistics for two regions, you can still estimate the traffic to your competitor’s website and find out its queries from the top. The service will automatically identify your closest competitors and tell you what queries you have in common with them.

You can use the domain comparison tool and find out in what ways you are better than your competitors, and which queries you have yet to bring to the top.

What can be analyzed:

• traffic;
• paid traffic.

SimilarWeb

In fact, this is your competitor's Yandex.Metrica. The platform provides unique data on all metrics - including behavioral ones - of the site.

The platform gives you reports on behavioral metrics - from which region users are visiting a competitive site, how much time they spend on the page. As with other services, you can download reports based on keywords - paid and organic.

A distinctive function is the interests of the audience. You will find out what other sites are visited by users of a competing resource. This means you can find additional platforms for posting your articles, new audiences for retargeting, and resources for your media plan.

What can be analyzed:

• traffic;
• behavioral metrics.

Alexa

The service can analyze both your resource and your competitor’s website. It will provide information about domain parameters and help you better know your target audience.

An interesting opportunity is to build a competitive matrix of keywords. You can easily recognize your keywords, competitors’ keywords, and also those phrases that are not yet occupied by anyone. This means it’s time to create and increase your influence in the information niche.

What can be analyzed:

• traffic;

Solomono

It will tell you what promotion strategy the competitor is following. You will find out the site’s position for queries of interest, what links it uses and how much money it spends.

It will also tell you what level of optimization your opponent has.

What can be analyzed:

• traffic;
• technical parameters of the site;
• link profile.

MegaIndex

First of all, this is an opportunity to check your site and find problems in SEO. On the other hand, you can analyze your competitor’s website. In the report, you will be sent information about incoming links to the site, keywords from the top for which the opponent is promoting, and the citation index.

You can analyze the quality of the content your competitor publishes. Find out what he does better than you, and what you succeed at. Or you can compare several sites at once.

What can be analyzed:

• site position in search results;
• quality of content;
• traffic;
• backlinks.

XTOOL

It will evaluate the technical optimization of a competitor’s website, show the authority of its domain and analyze the quality of the content.

You will receive data not only about site optimization, but also information that will help you choose a donor to place your links. The service operates according to its own algorithm, which takes into account many ranking factors.

What can be analyzed:

• link profile;
• technical specifications;
• quality of content;
• domain trust.

BuildWith

A useful service for market and niche analysis. It tracks more than 250 million different sites, including e-commerce.

The main thing is that you can conduct a detailed analysis of the competitor’s website technology. How it works, what analytics system the marketer uses and what platforms advertising specialists use.

You can first analyze your own website and find out what information your rivals can find out about you.

What can be analyzed:

• technical parameters of the site;
• Features of maintaining the Republic of Kazakhstan.

aTrends

Useful for online marketers who want to see competitors' advertisements. You just need to enter the domain, and the service will find all the ads and summarize all the data in a single report.

You will see information about indicators - impression volume, budget, click-through rate and cost per click. Also look at the position of domains in the Yandex.Direct search, the overpayment ratio and evaluate the tips that the service will offer you.

And if you have recently started your own business and do not know all your competitors, the service will tell you about them. It will find intersections using keywords.

What can be analyzed:

• advertising strategies of competitors;
• Internet advertising metrics.

AdVse

Another opportunity to understand how a competitor advertises is to use the AdVse service. You have access to complete analytics of ad impressions:

• key;
• the search engine where the user entered it;
• person's region (from Yandex and Google);
• date and time;
• Announcement text;
• type of ad unit;
• whether the user clicked.

After collecting requests, you can download a competitor report and compare your display strategies. All data is uploaded to one report - a log, where you see all user actions with ads.

What can be analyzed:

• target audience data;
• ad metrics.

iSpionage

The tool will help you find competitors who use display advertising on Google search.

You'll learn the keywords your opponent is running ads for, details of their PPC strategy, and the budget they're spending on advertising.

All data is summarized in a report. From it you can choose effective keywords from those that your competitors use.

Data is updated in real time and constantly sent to your email. And if you don't know which sites to monitor, you can find your competitors using keywords.

What can be analyzed:

• paid traffic;
• advertising metrics, including KEI and AEI.

RavenTools

The service is similar to the SimilarWeb tool. You also see summaries of competitors’ website metrics, and along with them you can look at interesting portal design solutions.

The service aggregates information from Moz and Majestic. This means that you receive information about competitive keys and target audiences of competitors.

The service is paid, but you can test all features during a 14-day trial period.

What can be analyzed:

• basic traffic metrics;
• technical aspects of the site.

KeywordSpy

Using the service, you can both analyze keywords and find competitors, and find out what words your opponent uses in advertising in AdWords, and how much money he spends on advertising.

Please note that the service does not analyze keys Russian brands. Therefore, it is suitable for those who are promoting abroad.

You enter the site address, Google AdSense or Analytics code, IP and get a list of sites that have the same owner.

The downside is the English-language interface; there are few Russian-language sites in the database. But it is compensated by being free.

You can analyze whether a competitor uses its own domain networks for link promotion - interconnected sites that allow you to transfer a lot of weight through links to the promoted portal.

What can be analyzed:

• domain owners;
• Features of link promotion of the site.

Simply Measured

For your attention - detailed reports on how your opponent promotes his business on different social networks. You will find out which brands users mention more often, which posts from a competitor are particularly liked by his subscribers.

You can also compare important metrics - engagement, reach, virality. As a result, you will receive all the data and understand how to revive your social networks and bring potential clients from there.

What can be analyzed:

• brand mentions;
• metrics on the effectiveness of posts on social networks;
• interests of the target audience.

What Runs Where

A useful service for introducing a product to a foreign market.

The name fully reflects the essence - you will see what product the competitor advertises, where he does it and for what key queries. You can find interesting creatives by country, domain, topic or keyword.

You also see where the main traffic comes from and what the demographics of the audience are.

What can be analyzed:

• advertising effectiveness;
• ad creatives;
• data about the target audience.

AdBeat

He will tell you which topics are the most profitable abroad. You will also learn about advertising tactics: which landing pages attract advertising traffic, how many days the ad was in operation.

What can be analyzed:

• popular campaign topics;
• ad metrics;
• approximate budgets.

Spyfu

Foreign service for contextual advertising analytics.

The service will allow you to learn everything about the contextual advertising of your competitors that they launch on the Google Display Network.

What can be analyzed:

Open Social Buzz

A tool for tracking content published by a competitor.

Feature - real-time content monitoring. You can enter the brand name, website address, or just keywords. The service will track new publications in accordance with the topic you specify.

The report contains: audience reaction, number of posts, types of content and keywords used.

What can be analyzed:

You can search for competitors by keywords or brand name. Every week, the service team sends you a report with all the information about the brands you are interested in.

What can be analyzed:

Google Alerts

The service analyzes new materials relevant to the key phrases that you enter into a special field.

When it appears on the Internet new entry, which matches the entered queries, you will receive an email with the source. You can use the service to monitor new materials, as well as to search for mentions of the name of a rival company.

The tool is free. You only need to register a Google account.

What can be analyzed:

Commun.it

A free way to track what's happening with your competitors on Twitter. You will find mentions of a competitor in the microblog and look at keyword analytics.

Useful if you want to find out what your competitor’s audience is tweeting.

What can be analyzed:

BuzzSumo

Shows which content on the site gets the most shares on social networks. Works both with phrases in Russian and English.

You can enter the URL of an article of interest and see if the article generated a response on social media.

What can be analyzed:

• social media engagement metrics;
• number of shares and reposts.

What's next?

In marketing, any metric plays its role. The more you know about your competitor, the more opportunities you have to outperform them.

We will tell you how to interpret the data you may receive in future publications. Subscribe so you don't miss anything!

Analyzing competitors is always useful, but most often comparative analysis I see a basic report on the age of the site, its TCI, the number of pages in the index, etc. There is little such information.

To optimize the pages of your site, it is not enough to simply write meta tags and headings; you need to analyze the TOPs. An analysis of competitors will tell you how you can improve your website and make it clear what your competitors have that keeps their websites in the TOP.
To conduct competitor analysis, you need to find them. How to do this, Evgeny Aralov wrote in his previous article: “”. Therefore, we will not repeat ourselves and will immediately move on to how to analyze competitors’ websites and why it is needed.

Basic competitor analysis

Typically this type of analysis includes:

• Checking the site registration date.
• Thematic Citation Index, also known as TCI.
• Number of pages in the index.

Basic analysis is convenient when you have little time to evaluate a site and need to quickly figure out which sites are currently in the TOP.

Based on the registration date, we find out the age of the sites in the TOP. If we have a young site, and in the TOP there are only “old people”, we will understand that the age of the site is not on our side. In such a situation, you need to carefully analyze your competitors in order to understand how to make your website better.

Based on the TCI, you can roughly determine the link profile of sites from the TOP: the higher the TCI, the better the link profile. However, now this figure is very approximate.

The number of pages will indicate the size of the site - in some topics, preference is given to large information resources.

Basic site analysis is ineffective, since the information obtained is very vague and approximate. It is only suitable for a quick inspection of competitors, but nothing more.

How to Conduct Basic Competitor Analysis

For basic analysis, you can use the free service CY-PR.com.

If there are many competing sites, you can use .

This service is convenient when you need to analyze a large number of sites. It is paid, the cost of checking is 0.025 rubles per site. As a result of the check, we get the following report:

Analysis of behavioral indicators

Most often, this type of analysis is needed when doubts arise about the behavioral indicators of your site.

It includes the following indicators:

• Total traffic for the month.
• Traffic per day.
• Time on site.
• Bounce rate.
• View depth.

By comparing the time on the site, we will see where visitors spend more time. If your competitors have a higher indicator, after analyzing them landing pages, we can understand how they retain users.

A large number of refusals may indicate that a person does not find the necessary information and leaves. By analyzing competitors with low bounce rates, you can figure out how to improve your rate. It should be taken into account that the bounce rate is a very vague parameter and needs to be analyzed carefully. The best way to look at the long click rate is visitors who spent more than a minute on the site. Typically, there should be at least 10% of such visitors on the site. The site itself is also important, for example, a one-page site on Google will have a bounce rate of 100%. Therefore, if you see a high bounce rate on your website, do not panic, but start analyzing your competitors.

Browsing depth will show the number of pages that the user opened when visiting the site. If competitors have a higher indicator, perhaps they have better interlinking or blocks with links look more attractive, motivating the user to click on them.

Time spent on a site, bounce rate, and browsing depth are closely related to each other, and improving one metric can lead to improving the other.

Case Study

At the beginning of last year on one information portal the failure rate was about 70%. After conducting a similar analysis, it was discovered that many competitors with a low bounce rate in their articles used “infinite scrolling” - when you scroll further after reading an article, the next article is loaded. By introducing such functionality on our website, we have significantly reduced the bounce rate, and also increased the time on the site and the depth of browsing.

When analyzing the above-mentioned indicators from competitors, it is convenient to immediately look at their traffic - this is checked with one tool.

By comparing competitors' traffic, we will understand who has more of it. In cases where your traffic is lower than that of your competitors, you need to analyze where they get it from - from what requests. We'll look at how to do this below.

You can read about how to work with behavioral factors in our articles:

How to check the behavioral indicators of competitors

For this I use the SimilarWeb service.

It shows the number of visits per month (Total Visits), time on the site (Avg. Visit Duration), viewing depth (Page per Visit) and bounce rate (Bounce Rate). In addition to these indicators, you can use it to learn about a lot of others, for example, look at your competitors’ traffic sources. Overall this is a good and free service.

To view daily traffic, I use the RDS API application.

Analysis of competitors' key phrases

This type of analysis includes finding competitors' queries for which they receive traffic. Knowing what queries your competitors are promoting for, you can expand your semantics. Also, the semantics of competitors can suggest new directions for promotion, for which new pages can be created.

I recommend reading about how to further expand the semantic core in our article “”.

How to check promoted queries from competitors

Of the purely free services, there is, mentioned in the basic analysis of competitors, CY-PR.com. He shows search phrases, by which the site is visible, but there are few of them.

Link analysis of competitors

Basic link analysis usually includes:

• Number of referring domains.
• Total number of links.
• Link anchors.

If you need to study competitors in detail, I recommend reading the instructions “”.

First of all, link analysis of competitors is needed when promoting a website under Google. In Yandex, the effect of links is not so noticeable.

By comparing the link profile of your site with your competitors, you will roughly understand how many links you need to increase. By analyzing the links and their anchors in more detail, you will find out which links your competitors are taking and will be able to draw up a rough plan for building up your link mass.

By downloading competitors' links, you can find sites for placing links to your site. To do this, you need to find domains that host several competitors. Most likely, you will also be able to link to your site on these domains.

How to conduct basic link analysis

The most popular service for this is Ahrefs.

This service allows you to analyze the link mass of a site in detail.

You can also see link anchors there:

Using the service, you can study in detail the link profile of competitors, link growth, etc. The main disadvantage is its price. The basic plan costs $82 per month.

If you need a basic competitor link analysis, you can use free analogue MegaIndex.

It will show basic information about the number of links, their growth and anchors.

In addition, it allows you to see what kind of links they are and their anchors. There is a possibility of export.

Tracking competitors' positions

You need to track your competitors' positions in order to understand what is happening in the search results.

Sometimes there are situations when a site suddenly loses positions. In a panic, we may start making unnecessary edits to pages, which will only make things worse. In such situations, it is best to monitor the positions of competitors. It may well be that their sites are also down, which means this is shaking the entire search results. If the drawdown affected only your site and several competitors, analyze which pages sank for them and for you. Try to find something in common. This will help you quickly understand what’s wrong with the site and return it to the TOP.

How to track competitors' positions

Everything is simple here: many people use services to track the positions of their website, and you can also track your competitors there. In my work I use SEOlib. It has a separate tab for competitor sites in the project:

This is convenient because I don’t need to create separate projects for competitors and I always have the opportunity to compare sites’ positions.

Site loading speed analysis

Website loading speed is one of the indicators by which a search engine will evaluate it. Loading speed also affects the behavioral indicators of the site. In cases where you are sure that your site is better than competitors, but it is not in the TOP, you should pay attention to the loading speed. Perhaps competitors' sites are better technically optimized and their pages load faster. Therefore, you need to ensure that your site loads at least no longer than your competitors, and better yet, faster.

How to check

The first service we need is WebPagetest.

In it you can see in detail how the site loads. This will help when finding errors.

It shows basic information about the site's loading speed.

You can also find options to improve loading speed here:

Website structure analysis

This analysis is needed to understand how to optimize a website, how to make it competitive, and what competitors have that you don’t.

For example, we have an online store and we don’t know whether to add text to product listing pages. In this case, you need to check the pages of competitors from the TOP. We checked, they don’t have the text. The question arises: how then to optimize the page to give it more relevance? Again, look at the pages from the TOP.

You need to compare absolutely everything that arouses interest on competitors’ pages: how their filter is structured, what anchors are used for product cards on listing pages, whether there are short descriptions; if this is an article - how it is formatted, etc. Then perhaps you will find a way to improve your site.

Example from practice. This is what part of the table looks like, according to which I compare the promoted site with competitors:

In the “Amount” field, I see how many competitors’ sites use the functionality I’m interested in; the last column is my site. This is only part of the table. Based on the results of this check, decisions were made to optimize pages, which bore fruit.

Therefore, try to compare everything as meticulously as possible.

How to check

You need to understand that all this is purely individual for each project. I check everything manually by making a table like this:

In the first column, I indicate the availability of the functionality I’m interested in, then I check whether competitors have it and see how it’s implemented in mine. The functionality of interest is selected individually for each site.

Results

Analysis of competitors' websites is useful, thanks to it we can always find out how else we can improve our website and prepare a plan for its optimization.

To conduct basic competitor analysis, use CY-PR.com, and SEOlib is more convenient for working with lists. To analyze the behavioral indicators of competitors, the similarweb.com service is suitable. If you need to understand why competitors more traffic, analyze their keywords through spywords.ru, Serpstat or at least free CY-PR.com.

To evaluate the link profile of competitors, I recommend using ahrefs.com, and for basic link analysis, the free megaindex.ru is suitable. To better understand what's happening in the search results, track your competitors' positions. For this I use SEOlib, you can use any position reading service that is convenient for you.

Check the loading speed of your site and your competitors' sites using webpagetest.org and PageSpeed ​​Insights. Remember, the faster your site loads, the better.

When you need to make a decision on optimizing website pages, their design, and improving the website as a whole, do not be lazy to do a structured analysis of competitors in as much detail as possible.

If you are confused and don’t know how to develop your website, contact us. We will audit your website, compare it with competitors and prepare recommendations for its improvement.

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We study competitors to find out the situation on the market, learn from them, identify and take advantage of their weaknesses. Ultimately, to create a more precise value proposition that will increase conversion to the target action (calls, requests, orders).

Do you have any competitors?

Even if you have come up with a new product for specific task, people have solved it before with other, albeit less perfect, methods. Any product or service has competitors.

Step 1: Find out how users might search for you

Automatic method

You can use the service Serpstat. It works like this: you choose search engine, region, enter a key phrase and request a report on it.

Important! Study audience requests in a specific area. Not just entrance doors, but either metal or wooden doors. For example, like this:

Manual method

For local businesses, connection to the region is important:

Since we are looking for direct competitors, we look at the left column. For our example, the service outputs this:

Result: you know the “hottest” queries on the desired topic.

Step 2: Determine who else is advertising for these queries on the same platform as you

Important!

• Evaluate your competitors in each narrow area (basis). If you are selling entrance doors, consider offers separately for metal and wooden doors;
• Study only those competitors who are located near you, in the same region.

We will show how to carry out the analysis using the example of the phrase “Metal entrance doors” (according to the Serpstat and Wordstat services, this is the highest-frequency request on this topic). Here are the results:

Note. To study competitors in all areas (metal, wood, glass, plastic entrance doors), work through each high-frequency request using the same principle.

Stage 3: semantic analysis

SpyWords

The values ​​are inaccurate, for example, the error in the context budget and average cost per click (CPC) is 20-25%, but closer to reality than the budget forecast in Direct.

Serpstat

In the side menu, select “Ads”:

You will see ads, the number of keywords for each + data on them:

Features of automatic semantic analysis

• Do not blindly trust the services - check the results manually through search results;
• Keep in mind that programs show the history of the last scan, and do not update it every hour. This is useful, since ads do not appear in search results at any time 24/7, but taking into account the schedule and distribution of impressions that you set up in Yandex and Google. And you edit or delete some ads. The service updates the information during the next scan.

Stage 4: Ad Analysis

Create a competitive comparison table in Excel. Here's a sample template:

In the example of metal door manufacturers in Perm, we used the following criteria for evaluation:

Example

What did we get? Here are the results for the first seven ads in the search results, which are the most relevant:

From this we can draw the following conclusions and give recommendations on how to do better to get ahead of competitors:

• There are no problems with the headings, but they are banal - you can create them;
• Almost everyone uses extended headlines—include one of your unique selling points to grab attention. Or do the same as here:

If you have a well-known brand, you can play on recognition:

• In clarifications, you can specify more facts to make the ad more informative if it ends up in the first position;

• Rating on the Market is, as a rule, for online stores. We recommend adding it if you have a long-term project. Yandex itself states that the rating increases the click-through rate of ads by 1.5%.

You already know that the text should be relevant, literate, detailed, but readable.

Let us remind you that you are unlikely to attract the attention of target users due to exclamation marks, text in capital letters and other meaningless things. Instead of calls “Click here!” formulate an honest and clear offer.

We also noted what advantages each competitor mentions in their ads:

Few people indicate the production date and reviews, but these details can make the ad stand out from others.

There is no point in writing separately about free measurements, since this is obvious if the doors are made to order. But the call to action “Order a measurement” or information that the measurement will be taken on the day of the order / at a convenient time will be useful.

Most used benefits:

• The assortment - this will not surprise anyone, a quick link to the catalog (if you sell ready-made ones) or types of finishing, design (if you make it to order) is enough;

Since the size of the ad is limited, you shouldn’t write a lot about this (it’s better to save space for specifics):

• Security - simply saying that the doors are safe or secure does not mean anything;

Note specific properties, for example:

• Name of company/brands - use if they are known;
• City - although you indicate it on the business card, in the extended mode of operation Yandex hides the name of the city. It’s worth additionally specifying so that the user knows for sure that you are near him.

And, of course, try to avoid evaluative concepts:

The result: you know what you should pay more attention to when creating ads.

Stage 5: landing page analysis

This is the final destination where only the most interested users end up. Take as a basis all the factors they pay attention to, predict possible objections and clarifying questions (and answer them with your own example!)

We will look at the landing pages of 3 sellers of metal entrance doors in the Perm region.

Landing page "Glasshouse"

Here's the announcement:

We move on - and the first thing that comes up is an online consultant and the choice of city, although the ad says Perm.

Select “Perm” and get to home page site. Despite the fact that we wrote a specific request - metal entrance doors - we still need to look for them:

The content corresponds to what was promised in the ad: a really large selection for different budgets;

The extra step is choosing a city;

The catalog is “buried” under a lot of information that is irrelevant to the request;

To summarize, a visitor who clicks on the main title of the ad is forced to take several extra steps before getting to the metal doors.