lets Begin, First of all
It is crucial to understand what your market position is and what the capabilities of your competitors are. This will allow you to set your goals correctly, start with the most effective traffic tools, and more. Competitor analysis services such as Similarweb, SEMRush, Serpstat, and others, give you an insight on critical points:
Let’s start with the most powerful service available, Similarweb.com. SimilarWeb will allow you to see how much traffic your competitors have, the quality of your site’s traffic compared to your competitors, and where your market peers are acquiring their audience.
I suggest that we get started right away and move straight from theory to practice. Put your laptop in front of you and fill in a table with an analysis of your competitors.
Put 10-15 competitor websites into your table and answer the three questions I set above. We will need SimilarWeb.com for this exercise. Just add your website to SimilarWeb.com, and then let’s analyze this data together.
Audience size
Monthly traffic
Quality of the site
Average time spent on site (Avg. Visit Duration)
Average number of web pages (Pages per Visit)
Bounce rate (percentage of visitors who viewed only one page of the website.)
Main traffic sources
Which sites drive the most referrals;
A percentage split between paid and non-paid (organic) search traffic
Major social networking sites
Traffic trend over the past six months.
Similarweb will not present data for websites that receive less than 50 thousand monthly visits. Before starting any activity, it is vital to understand whether there is a significant number of audiences in your niche.
The size of your competitor’s audience is the first thing you need to pay attention to. Paying attention to your competitor’s audience’s size will allow you to set accurate expectations of possible traffic volume in your niche. Some niches have a traffic volume of more than 10 thousand visitors per month, others have more than 100 thousand visitors per month, and there are even niches with more than a million monthly visitors. Analyses of sites like Amazon and eBay show that their monthly audience exceeds a billion. An objective understanding of how much traffic your competitors get will help you build realistic plans and move towards achieving what you want.
Average time spent on a site (Avg. Visit Duration)
The average number of web pages viewed (Pages per Visit)
Bounce rate (percentage of visitors who viewed only one page of the website)
Compare your site to your competitors using these three metrics. If you are significantly behind your competitors, then you need to improve. It is important to consider the type of website you are viewing. They should all be similar. You cannot compare a full-fledged online store with a one-page website… Remember this!
The issue of the website’s quality is extremely subjective. Usually, it is one person in the company who makes the final website development decisions. This is either the director, marketing director, or marketer. His taste preferences will determine whether the design will be restrained or lurid or if the developers try to fit all the information on one page instead of making a full-fledged website.
When I ask large audiences if they consider their site to be of high quality, only a few hands are raised. Dozens of hands raise when I ask if their website is of low quality. But these are examples of subjective opinion. A website that may seem like an outdated monster to you may fully correspond to your audience’s user experience. This chapter’s main idea is to make objective data-driven assessments rather than rely on a certain person’s opinions.
Competitors’ traffic sources
You have already been “inspired” by the traffic volume on competitive sites, but now you are tormented by the questions -
Let’s take a closer look at precisely what sources your market colleagues are getting their audience from.
An example of different traffic sources:
Let’s comment on each of these columns.
Direct (direct traffic) - the audience that knows how to spell your website’s name and enters it directly into the browser’s address bar or arrives at the site through browser bookmarks. This is your loyal audience!
Referral (referral traffic) - traffic that came from backlinks (links from some other websites) - partners, dealers, forums, news resources. Scrolling down the report page, slightly below, you will see the TOP 5 referrers.
Search (search traffic) - this includes referrals from organic search results and paid search ads.
Social (social traffic) - traffic from social networks.
E-mail (email traffic) - traffic that comes from your email marketing campaigns.
Display (display advertising traffic) - traffic from banner ad networks.
for both startups and already existing businesses.
For example, we saw that our competitors’ search traffic dynamics are higher than ours over the past year, even though we are doubling in size year after year. This has led to a shift in SEO strategy and a nearly 50% improvement in search traffic dynamics. That concludes our acquaintance with SimilarWeb; now, we will move to competitive analysis in search engines.
Search is the leading driver of traffic in most niches. There are 10 billion Google searches per day. These people are looking for services, products, information about companies, and solutions to their problems. Understanding the strategies of search traffic is just as important as understanding the general state of affairs.
You need to know:
Keywords your competitors use in search engine optimization
Keywords your competitors are using in paid ads
Messages that are used in ads
which pages of a website drive the most traffic
The main competitors in organic and paid search advertising
You can find out all of this information using services such as SEMRush and Serpstat. The one you use depends on the geographical location of your business. Each of these tools is easy to use. You enter a website address or a key phrase, and then you get detailed information about how to improve your search engine optimization marketing.
It is extremely important to sit down and review your competitors’ activities regarding their content strategy. So what should we do? Re-read blog posts and review videos on YouTube-channels?
I would recommend that you do some of the things below instead:
subscribe to the mailing lists of your major competitors.
follow their social media profiles.
subscribe to their YouTube channels.
Social networks have a vast audience. People go there to communicate, have fun and, of course, share information. How often have you seen posts like “Recommend a dentist …”, “Which cheap Android phone is better?”, etc…There is traffic on social networks, and high-quality content is the primary way to drive traffic from there. Understanding which content will work and which will not work is extremely important.
Tools like Ahrefs Content Explorer and BuzzSumo let you know what content gets the most social media shares. It’s crucial to realize trends that are going on within social media. So how do you use this newfound knowledge? Well, take me for example. When I was preparing the next annual content plan, I noticed that our market peers get the most reposts from compilations of:
top blogs
top Telegram channels
top YouTube channels worth subscribing to
The advantage of such compilations is that they can always be expanded, regrouped, and supplemented with your comments, and you get an excellent viral post. A blog post of TOP 500 Digital Marketing Blogs has garnered more than 1500 reposts and is one of the five most-read blog posts.
Competitive analysis is a regular process. It should be done at least once a quarter or at least once every six months. Doing competitive analysis will allow you to distance yourself from the competition and always be ahead.
If you want to improve or add some point, then please don’t hesitate and feel free to consider improving and helping others to learn.