Spy on your competitors

Competitors are essential in what you want to do. Find them to learn about what they do, how they do it; what works and what doesn’t work for them.

Competition is a good thing, especially if it forces companies to grow and evolve and helps create better products and services for the consumer.

Monitoring your competitors means learning from their strengths and weaknesses, what works and what doesn’t. It’s about learning and growing.

The idea is not to look at your competitors as a threat. The reality is that there will always be a company with a little more success than yours. Maybe it gets new leads, more engagement or visibility more easily.

You just need the right tools to do it. The information gathered online about them is more or less reliable; these are indicators that give you a thorough knowledge of your market.

Four elements to analyze:

✔The design and content of their website: tools and technologies that the website uses (wappalyzer, woorank, semrush)

✔Leur referencing

✔Leur traffic

✔Leurs social networks

Find and analyze your competitors

The first thing to do is to find your competitors. They can be classified in 2 groups:

• The very, very big competitors who are hard to reach. It is necessary to analyze their website and be inspired by the good practices that work for them.
• The smaller ones, direct or indirect, are much more attainable in the short term.

The main objective will be to overtake the competitors in the coming months.

Google searches are usually not enough to find competitors. Other tools such as: Yooda Insight , semrush, Neil Patel, Moz, SEO Quake

For example, with Yooda Insight in the leaders module, you enter the keywords related to the theme you are interested in and the tool recommends the best performing competitors (in SEO) in this field. In the competitor tab, you will find the main competitors of the analyzed website.

Analyze competitors’ social networks:

The competitive analysis of social networks is interesting to make an inventory of competitors and more globally on your theme. This is a good point to identify:

• Most popular topics
• The types of publications that work best
• The medium that works best: video, text, audio, Gif…
• The tone used by competitors
• Frequency of publication
• The keywords used
• Community size
• Community involvement
• The social network in question

To do this, nothing could be easier than to go directly to their social networks to see what they are doing in order to analyze and improve yours.

Some tools: Facebook insight, Followerwonk, Buzzsumo, Agora Pulse, Fanpagekarma

Analyze the traffic of its competitors

The best way to know on whom to take example is to analyze the traffic data of the competitors’ site. This will allow you to sort out your competitors and identify the strong and the weak.

Tools to use:

Similar Web: this is the most reliable tool I’ve found to indicate the approximate traffic of a website. Be careful, this tool only works on very big competitors. You will be able to know the global traffic, the bounce rate, the number of pages per session, the countries of origin of the traffic, the social network that brings the most traffic, the external website that brings the most traffic, the average time spent on the site, the source of the main traffic… You will be able to collect a lot of data.

If not, there is Yooda Insight, Semrush

Analyze the construction of their website

With the right tools, you are able to know almost everything about your competitors’ websites, the technologies they use and why not use the same technologies for yours.

We can have for example:

Built With : a very complete tool to know everything about web design. Which CMS do your competitors use? What tools do they use? You can find out almost everything.

WordPress theme detector: very useful to know the theme used by a website

Wappalyser: an extension that you can install on your browser to know also the technologies that a website uses.