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As a marketer, undoubtedly you put a lot of time into how you present your products to the world. But if you're not careful you could end up spending too much time focusing on your own product, and completely forget about another important piece: what your competitors are doing. And if what they're doing is a mystery to you, you're going to fall behind.

That's why every marketer should make sure that they're keeping tabs on their competition with an in-depth competitive analysis: a place where they can track all the details of competing products. Once you have a comprehensive idea of what your competition is doing, you'll not only be able to better sway their customers to your product - you'll also have a clearer idea of where you stand in your industry and what opportunities are available.

Here's a step-by-step guide on how you can use competitive analysis to stay one step ahead in your industry.

Bonus: Learn how to organize your findings using a simple competitive analysis example template in Confluence.

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Perform A Competitive Analysis | Atlassian

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As a marketer, undoubtedly you put a lot of time into how you present your products to the world. But if you're not careful you could end up spending too much time focusing on your own product, and completely forget about another important piece: what your competitors are doing.

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5 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

The competitive analysis is a statement of the business strategy and how it relates to the competition. The purpose of the competitive analysis is to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the competitors within your market, strategies that will provide you with a distinct advantage, the barriers that can be developed in order to prevent competition from entering your market, and any weaknesses that can be exploited within the product development cycle.

The first step in a competitor analysis is to identify the current and potential competition. As mentioned in the "Market Strategies" chapter, there are essentially two ways you can identify competitors. The first is to look at the market from the customer's viewpoint and group all your competitors by the degree to which they contend for the buyer's dollar. The second method is to group competitors according to their various competitive strategies so you understand what motivates them.

Once you have grouped your competitors, you can start to analyze their strategies and identify the areas where they are most vulnerable. This can be done through an examination of your competitors' weaknesses and strengths. A competitor's strengths and weaknesses are usually based on the presence and absence of key assets and skills needed to compete in the market.

To determine just what constitutes a key asset or skill within an industry, David A. Aaker in his book, Developing Business Strategies suggests concentrating your efforts in four areas:

1. The reasons behind successful as well as unsuccessful firms

2. Prime customer motivators

3. Major component costs

4. Industry mobility barriers

According to theory, the performance of a company within a market is directly related to the possession of key assets and skills. Therefore, an analysis of strong performers should reveal the causes behind such a successful track record. This analysis, in conjunction with an examination of unsuccessful companies and the reasons behind their failure, should provide a good idea of just what key assets and skills are needed to be successful within a given industry and market segment.

For instance, in the personal-computer operating-system software market, Microsoft reigns supreme with DOS and Windows. It has been able to establish its dominance in this industry because of superior marketing and research as well strategic partnerships with a large majority of the hardware vendors that produce personal computers. This has allowed DOS and Windows to become the operating environment, maybe not of choice, but of necessity for the majority of personal computers on the market.

Microsoft's primary competitors, Apple and IBM, both have competing operating systems with a great deal of marketing to accompany them; however, both suffer from weaknesses that Microsoft has been able to exploit. Apple's operating system for its Macintosh line of computers, while superior in many ways to DOS and Windows, is limited to the Macintosh personal computers; therefore, it doesn't run many of the popular business applications that are readily available to DOS and Windows. To an extent, IBM's OS/2 operating system suffers from the same problem. While it will run on all of the personal computers DOS and Windows can run on and even handle Windows applications, the number of programs produced for OS/2 in its native environment is very small. This is the type of detailed analysis you need in analyzing an industry.

Through your competitor analysis you will also have to create a marketing strategy that will generate an asset or skill competitors do not have, which will provide you with a distinct and enduring competitive advantage. Since competitive advantages are developed from key assets and skills, you should sit down and put together a competitive strength grid. This is a scale that lists all your major competitors or strategic groups based upon their applicable assets and skills and how your own company fits on this scale.

To put together a competitive strength grid, list all the key assets and skills down the left margin of a piece of paper. Along the top, write down two column headers: "weakness" and "strength." In each asset or skill category, place all the competitors that have weaknesses in that particular category under the weakness column, and all those that have strengths in that specific category in the strength column. After you've finished, you'll be able to determine just where you stand in relation to the other firms competing in your industry.

Once you've established the key assets and skills necessary to succeed in this business and have defined your distinct competitive advantage, you need to communicate them in a strategic form that will attract market share as well as defend it. Competitive strategies usually fall into these five areas:

Many of the factors leading to the formation of a strategy should already have been highlighted in previous sections, specifically in marketing strategies. Strategies primarily revolve around establishing the point of entry in the product life cycle and an endurable competitive advantage. As we've already discussed, this involves defining the elements that will set your product or service apart from your competitors or strategic groups. You need to establish this competitive advantage clearly so the reader understands not only how you will accomplish your goals, but why your strategy will work.

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5 min read Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. The competitive analysis is a statement of the business strategy and how it relates to the competition.

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Keeping an eye on your competitors helps you anticipate shifts in the market, spot new trends and successful tactics, and stay on the cutting edge of what's working within your niche.

But it's not enough to just spy on your competitors' social media accounts and subscribe to their email lists. You need a strategy behind your efforts to ensure you're effectively monitoring your competitors on an ongoing basis and updating your view of the competitive landscape as it changes.

Enter the competitive analysis: a document that gives you both a bird's-eye view and an in-depth understanding of the key players in your market.

In this post, we'll outline a method for conducting a competitive analysis of your own, geared towards ecommerce businesses.

Whether you're a seasoned store owner re-evaluating your view of the current market, or you're getting ready to bring your product to market for the very first time, here are the steps, tools, and even a template ( skip to the template) to help you put together your own competitive analysis.

What is a competitive analysis?

A competitive analysis is the analysis of your competitors and how your business compares. By evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of your competition, you can begin to formulate how to give your company an advantage.

Competitive analysis helps a business determine potential advantages and barriers within a target market around a product or service, and generally helps brands monitor how direct and indirect competitors are executing tactics like marketing, pricing, and distribution.

What should you cover in a competitor analysis?

Your competitive analysis can vary widely depending on what you're trying to learn about your competitors. You might do a competitive analysis around a specific aspect of your competitors' business-like their website, for example-or you might do a high-level look at their marketing approach as a whole.

There are a lot of different ways you can structure a competitive analysis, so let's look at the types of information that are frequently seen within this kind of research.

If you're doing a high-level competitor analysis, there are a few major elements you'll want to be sure to include around competitors' market positioning, such as:

Who their target customers are

What market share to they currently own

What their main differentiator or unique value-add is for their business and products

Key features/benefits they highlight in sales materials

Price points for products, even across different marketplaces

How they approach shipping

If they've received any funding or venture capital

These sections will help you get a zoomed out look at what separates these businesses from each other and how they're working to differentiate themselves from the competition within the niche.

If you want to look at more specific elements of your competitors' approaches, you might consider adding sections like these to your competitive analysis:

Features on competitors' websites (like search tools, product images, design/layout, etc.)

Customer experience elements (cart abandonment strategy, customer support, mobile UX, etc.)

Social media approach (channels used, frequency of posting, engagement, etc.)

Content marketing tactics (blog topics, content types, etc.)

Marketing tactics (types of promotions, frequency of discounts, etc.)

Email marketing approach (Newsletter, promo codes, etc.)

Customer reviews (language used around products, recurring complaints, etc.)

Generally, competitive analysis can take on many shapes and forms depending on what a company wants to evaluate about its competitors, but this should give you a rough idea of what could be included within the different sections.

Why competitive analysis matters for ecommerce

Maybe at this point you're thinking, "Okay, but why does competitor analysis matter for me as a business owner? "

The main reason this activity is important is because you can't effectively compete without knowing your direct competitors-and you can't differentiate yourself if you don't know what actually makes you different.

For ecommerce businesses in particular, a competitive analysis can also help:

Make more informed decisions about your marketing strategy

Identify industry trends

Create benchmarks for yourself

Determine your pricing strategies

Unearth new ways of speaking to customers, or even new customers to speak to

Finding a gap in the market, but also ensuring there's a "market in the gap"

This type of analysis is not just for first-time business owners, either. A competitive analysis can be a living document that's constantly evolving as your company grows and matures over time.

Maintaining a resource like this is a powerful way to measure how your brand stacks up against the competition right now-but it also can help provide clear direction on how you'll continue to excel in the future.

How to conduct a competitive analysis

Once you're ready to dive into a competitive analysis of your own, you can follow the steps outlined here to keep your research structured and organized appropriately.

Step 1: Create a list of 7-10 competitors

To identify relevant competitors to include in your analysis, start with searches on Google, Amazon, and Alexa around your product and business idea. You want a mix of competitors that:

Sell similar types of products

Have a similar business premise

Market to similar and slightly different audience demographics

Are both new to the marketplace and more experienced

To put together a list of diverse competitors that will give you a good look at the competitive landscape that's not too small and not too large, it's a good idea to create a list of 7-10 relevant competitors, before deciding on the ones you want to analyze.

Step 2: Create a spreadsheet

As you collect data on this group of competitors, keep it organized within a table or spreadsheet that can be easily shared and updated over time. Within this document, jot down the different criteria you want to compare and contrast, such as:

Price range

Product offerings

Social media engagement

Content used for lead generation

First time visitor offers

Other traits that are worth exploring

Step 3: Identify primary/secondary competitors

Starting with your list of competitors, begin your spreadsheet by categorizing each one as a primary, secondary, or tertiary competitor. This will help you better determine how they'll relate to your business:

1. Primary competitors are your business' direct competition, selling a similar product/service to your target audience. These are the brands that your customers may compare you to. Example: Nike and Adidas are primary competitors.

2. Secondary competitors sell similar products or services but to a different audience (e.g. they focus upmarket or downmarket with their products). Example: Victoria's Secret and Wal-Mart are secondary competitors.

3. Tertiary competitors are related brands who may market to the same audience, but don't sell the same products as you or directly compete with you in any way. They may be potential partners or future competitors if they choose to expand their business. Example: Gatorade and Under Armour.

Step 4: Collect data via tools

Once you know which competitors you'll be studying, it's time to start diving into research and data collection for your competitor analysis. The good news is that today there are many different tools available that can make data collection for your competitive analysis simpler, more efficient, and more accurate.

Depending on what stage you're at with your business and the size of your budget, you can invest in more powerful tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush to monitor the competition over time. But for the sake of this post, we'll explore some of the more accessible options to help you research your competition.

SimilarWeb offers insights into estimated monthly visits and key traffic sources for a website. This can help you guess at where your competitors are focusing their marketing efforts. You might even discover other websites like yours, and thus new competitors to monitor and learn from.

Mailcharts can give you insight into your competitors' email marketing, from the frequency of email sends, their subject line tactics, and more.

You can plug your competitor's domain into Buzzsumo to see their top-performing content, as well as total social shares and where that content has been shared. You can also use this to discover other websites that are producing content in your space.

Alexa helps you identify the audience demographics and search rankings related to a website, as well as some of the sites that are linking to and mentioning your competitors to get a handle on their PR and SEO strategy.

Facebook Audience Insights (access through your Facebook Business Manager) can give you a variety of information about audiences on one of the largest social networks around. For many established competitors, you can even see the breakdown of their Facebook page's followers, including age, gender, and geography.

Using these resources, you can start gathering data and dropping it into your competitive analysis spreadsheet so that your findings are all stored in a single, organized space.

Step 5: Do some hands-on research

Along with the research you're doing through software and tools, it's a good idea to get hands-on with your competitive research. Assume the role of a potential customer and check out what your competitors are doing in the marketing department.

You can do this by:

Subscribing to their blog

Following them on social media

Abandoning a product in your shopping cart

Even purchasing a product and evaluating the customer experience

As you execute these activities, be sure to document your findings with notes on the tactics you see. By studying their approaches to cart abandonment and looking at how they deliver support via social media (and beyond), you can spot interesting approaches your competition is using to attract more customers and drive sales.

Supplemental data

You can further expand the insight you gain from your competitive analysis by also gathering information about the market, such as industry-specific trends and economic indicators.

Consider doing a SWOT analysis to accompany this data set, which outlines the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats around your business and your competitor's. Defining these areas will help you take an objective look at your business and can help you make smarter, more informed choices that future-proof your brand.

Competitive analysis template

If you're still not quite sure how to start laying out your template for a competitive analysis, here's a free competitive analysis template you can work from to get the ball rolling. Simply copy it to your own Google Drive, or you can download the spreadsheet to work through. Go to File > Make a Copy... OR Download as.

An example of a competitive analysis

Let's say you sell make-up brushes, here's one way you could use this template to compare competitors' approaches to your own (and identify what you could do to stand out):

Remember that you can add as many sections as you want to your analysis, but be sure to keep your list of competitors limited to under 10 to ensure your research is focused and highly relevant.

Common pitfalls to avoid

Now that you know how to put together a competitive analysis, let's go over some of the major pitfalls to be aware of that can throw off the insights you've gathered.

1. Competitive analysis is not a one-and-done exercise

Never revisiting your original insights (or updating them, for that matter) can lead to faulty data and poor decisions. Businesses are constantly evolving, so it's important to remember that keeping an eye on your competitors is an ongoing process-not something you do once and then never again.

2. Ignoring your own biases

As humans, we have a tendency to jump to conclusions around our assumptions. This is called confirmation bias. As you work through your competitive analysis, it's important to be aware of your initial assumptions and to test them thoroughly rather than leaning on what you "think" is true about your competitors. Let the data inform your decisions rather than letting assumptions take the lead.

3. Data without action is useless

If you're putting in the work to do a competitive analysis, be sure that you're acting on the findings rather than letting them gather virtual dust on your computer, buried in an obscure file folder. Make a strategic plan around your findings and execute on the unique angles and marketing tactics that you've discovered during this process.

4. Creating more work than you need to

With so many great resources available that simplify the data collection process around competitive analysis today, putting together a top-notch, highly accurate comparison is easier than ever. Don't reinvent the wheel and do things the hard way: use tools that speed up the process and provide the important insights you need to make informed decisions about your business.

5. Starting without a direction

If you're directionless while putting together your competitive analysis and have no clear end objective, the work will be much, much harder. Before diving into research, define your goal and what you hope to learn about your competition.

6. Not accounting for market timing

When looking at competitor data, be sure to study how companies have grown and progressed over time rather than examining their approaches at a single, fixed point in time. Sometimes information about how your competitors have evolved their tactics can be even more useful than knowing what they did in the early days (or what they're doing right now).

Competitive analysis: Your business edge

With the above template as a starting point, along with the resources and tools we covered, hopefully you're better equipped to approach your own competitive analysis.

By conducting a competitive analysis, and evolving your understanding of your market over time, you can help yourself stay on top of your competitors and even learn from them too.

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How to Conduct a Competitive Analysis for Your Business (Plus a Free Template)

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Keeping an eye on your competitors helps you anticipate shifts in the market, spot new trends and successful tactics, and stay on the cutting edge of what's working within your niche. But it's not enough to just spy on your competitors' social media accounts and subscribe to their email lists.

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Definition: A competitive analysis is the process of categorizing and evaluating your competitors to understand their strengths and weaknesses in comparison to your own.
In other words, it's not a complicated idea. It's common knowledge that the better you understand your competitors, the better chance you have of beating them.

The concept might be simple, but the process is more complicated. A competitive analysis can cover a whole range of areas, metrics, and disciplines. Some of these will be more important dependent on who you are, but the more exhaustive you are the more effective your competitive analysis will be.

We've attempted to give you a comprehensive list of steps to help you undertake a competitive analysis. Combine these with your own understanding of your industry and business, and you'll have something really powerful.

How to identify competitors

First things first. You need to know who your competitors are. You'll probably already have a list, but have you considered every angle?

Let's start with the basics for those running new businesses where the environment is yet to be explored.

Kinds of competitors

There isn't just one type of competitor out there. There are direct and indirect competitors (also known as primary and secondary respectively).
Direct competitors
These are companies offering the same service or products as you in the same geographical area - targeting the same audience and serving the same needs.
Indirect competitors
These are companies who offer the same, or similar, services and products to you in the same area, but who are serving a different need or purpose or targeting a different audience.

As an example, say you sell beer. Your product is stocked in supermarkets around the country.

A direct competitor would be someone who also sells beer and has their product stocked in the same kind of places as you do. The beers are similarly priced and both are targeted at the same group of people.

An indirect competitor would be someone who sells wine. The wine is sold in the same place, but the product is obviously different, while the target market is also different but with some overlap. This would not be a direct competitor, but they could still be taking some of your business if their product convinces someone to go for a glass of red over a beer that evening.
Tertiary competitors
There is also third type of competitor, a tertiary competitor. This is someone who sells a product that might be vaguely linked to yours, but doesn't really compete. Identifying these types of competitors is still important.

Why? These are competitors that could become direct or indirect ones if they decide to pivot. You don't need to do as much research on them, but keeping an eye on any big changes or developments on their end could be beneficial.

Now we know how to define the type of competitor, it's time to start finding them.

Google and search engines

Google, or the search engine of your choice, is a prime starting point. Here you can do a number of things to dig up competitors, all through the use of algorithms none of us will ever truly understand.

First up, just search your company name. In some cases Google will list a bunch of companies that other people search for along with searching for yours. Here's what happens when you type "brandwatch" into Google:

This knowledge panel appears on the right handside of the Google's search engine results page (SERP), and at the bottom it gives us a list of related companies. You can even click to get some more.

Now, this list isn't perfect. It's a mix of direct, indirect, and tertiary competitors. But it's a start and, by using this list to search more companies in Google to repeat the purpose, we'll soon have a sizeable list of companies to look at.

Beyond searching your brand name, you can also search for terms related to your business to see who else pops up. If you repair computers across California, just search "California computer repairs" and, lo and behold, there'll be a bunch of them (likely direct ones).

Make a big list of keywords and phrases that are linked to your products and searches and get Googling (or Binging or DuckDuckGoing) and you'll soon have a massive list of potential competitors.

This isn't the last we'll see of Google in this guide. It's also a great tool for conducting competitive analysis itself. Find out more in our SEO competitive analysis section.

Search engine ads

Similar to the previous section, here we're referring to the ads we get served in the SERPs. We can follow the same process as we did for the previous section, except this time we're just looking at the ads.

Here's some ad results for searching 'social listening company' in Google:

And there we go. This can also work by searching company names, as competitors will often bid on each. Throw in a few things (the keyword list you created in the previous section will be useful here) to see what comes up.

Why do we do this as well look at normal Google results? Because some companies might not be ranking for certain terms, either because they're too new or not putting much effort into SEO. Meanwhile, chucking money into ads can be a quick way to get noticed.

Make sure you do the searches multiple times to see as many ads as possible. It'll also give you some insight into what terms your competitors are targeting.

Content tools

Tools like BuzzSumo, that allow you to analyze content, can be a good way to find competitors too. For example, searching relevant business and industry terms will give you the most shared content on those topics.

From there you can sift through the articles and blog posts for mentions of companies other than yourself. There's likely to be a bit more rubbish to rummage through with this, but it's important not to leave any stone unturned.

Head to our content competitive analysis section later on to see how to use these tools to learn more about your competition.

Prospects and customers

The people you're trying to sell to or have sold to, can also help you discover competitors. Simply asking them about competitors will furnish you with some names.

Be sure to keep this up, as well. New companies will be proactive in approaching your clients, so they can often be the first warning of a new rival on the scene.

You can do this as part of your sales process by asking about previous suppliers when getting customer info. Also, if you've got a particularly good relationship with a client, just ask them to send over any sales material they get sent by other firms.

Trade publications

If there are any publications in your industry, physical or digital, make sure you're checking these regularly. Competitors will pop up, but they'll also help you keep an eye out for new companies or others changing up their plans that might affect you.

Social media and forums

This is in a similar vein to speaking to prospects and customers, but you won't be talking to them directly here. We talk about anything and everything on the internet, especially now we have things like Twitter and Reddit. This means there's a wealth of info out there.

We got into more detail on using this for a competitive analysis later, but it can be good for finding competitors initially.

Use the search functions for various platforms and forums to dig up mentions or discussions on products and services. Have a read around and you'll likely find some competitors pop up - for example, when people ask for recommendations. Our Twitter search guide will come in handy here.

It's even better if there's a subreddit dedicated to your industry (such as this one on smart home devices for an example). You'll be able to discover plenty of competitors this way. Here's a guide on Reddit if you're not familiar.

How to conduct a competitive analysis

Now that we have our list of competitors, it's time to start the actual competitive analysis. Not all of these steps will be useful or relevant to you, but each one should at least be explored.

Each step is broken down so that you'll get a description, how to conduct this part of a competitive analysis, and then some guiding questions or ideas to lead the analysis.

When you've got all the data together, you can then start comparing yourself in a useful way to your competitors and discover areas to improve, as well as how your rivals might start taking business from you.

It's a good idea to build out a spreadsheet where you can keep all this info in one place. Consider setting up multiple tables, one for your main direct competitors, one for your main indirect competitors, and then a list of any competitors you want to keep an eye on. The third spreadsheet will end up being quite extensive, but use it more as an index and data resource than something you check and update regularly.

The basic stats

We'll start with the simple stuff. Before we get into the nitty-gritty, we want to get a general overview of a competitor, including their size, reach, activities, and personnel. This will help you get a basic comparison going between you and your competitors.

Data points to consider:

Revenue

Number of clients

Number of offices and locations

Number of employees

Info on noteworthy employees

Products and services they offer

Areas they operate in

The websites and social channels they own

Company history and significant milestones

Messaging

This is an area where we can start to get a good idea on how a company sees themselves and what they're trying to achieve. Remember, their messaging will be spread across a range of mediums and channels such as:

Website copy

Social media

Physical materials (such as brochures and trade materials)

Employees speaking at events

Emails

Press appearances

Interviews given by employees

Product copy (such as on packaging or in an app)

Each of these (and any others we've not covered), will give you an insight into what your competitor sees as important, their key areas, and the kind of people they're targeting. It's worth mentioning that the above examples are not created equal. Be wary of discerning a company's direction from a CEO's speech at one conference. Their website and material copy will likely be more illuminating.

Example

It's the year 2320 and travelling to Mars for a leisure trip or work is just an everyday thing. Two companies offer this service: Starcrest Executive and SimpleShuttle.

If we look at their websites, Starcrest Executive talks about luxury and comfort on their Mars trips, with the actual cost not mentioned except on a specific page. With SimpleShuttle, the costs are upfront, appear on multiple pages, and are presented as cheap, while the copy talks about value and efficiency.

From that we can make an assumption that Starcrest Executive are targeting people with a higher income than SimpleShuttle, and that their selling points differ (comfort vs cost).

It's a simple example, and signifiers like this might depend on your industry, but it'll help you get an idea of the kinds of things to look for.

Questions to consider:

What is their opening piece of copy on their homepage?

What features/products do they emphasise?

What are their selling points?

How do they talk/what language do they use?

Who are they talking to?

What imagery do they use?

What competitors do they talk about?

What clients do they highlight?

Website content analysis

It isn't news to anyone that websites are incredibly valuable for selling and getting leads. But, of course, it's also easy to have a site that fails at doing either. Keeping up to date with technology and the latest trends is important for website conversions.

This is why it's important to look at what your competitors are doing. Are they getting ahead or falling behind? What gaps can you fill that they're failing to? What are they attempting but doing badly?

For a start, look at the type of content they produce. Most will have blogs so see what topics they cover, how often they post, and how well they perform. Do they do any long-form content, such as guides or reports?

Have a good root around their entire site and see what you can dig up. See if there's a common theme between your competitors and compare their resources to yours.

Of course, an important part of this is seeing what actually works. There's no reason to copy something that fails.

Tools like BuzzSumo will help you start with this. Chuck in a domain URL and it will tell you what kind of content gets the most shares.

Here's how ours looks:

If you were a competitor of ours, you can see that we've seen some decent successes on social, and across various platforms. You also get to see what types of content work too.
It shows, for example, that there's some worth in covering what our products can do rather than what they are.

You'll also notice that Buzzsumo includes the number of links pieces get. This is good for looking at referral traffic, but it's also important for search engine optimization (SEO). We've got a whole step dedicated to that down here.

Questions to consider:

What types of content do my competitors create?

What topics and themes do they focus on?

Who are they targeting?

What needs are they trying to meet?

How well does it perform?

What types of content and topics perform best?

How are they using this content to get leads or sell products?

Social media analysis

There's a huge amount of insight to be gained looking at how your competitors use social media, but also at how people on social media talk about them.

One of the first things to do is to get an understanding of what your competitors are up to. What platforms do they use? Who do they talk to? What kind of posts do they make?

This will be very surface level but take a look at who is performing best and what's causing that success. Then you can start to go a bit deeper.

Using Brandwatch Audiences you can analyze a competitor's Twitter following, including who they are, what they talk about, and who influences them. That's just for Twitter, but there are other tools around that can help here as well.

It's also important to see who has the biggest share of voice on social media. You'll need tools to do this, and we've got a explainer on social share of voice to help. Take a look at that and make sure you keep an eye on the percentages regularly. "Set and forget" is not a good idea - things can change rapidly.

Another of our tools, Brandwatch Analytics, can help you analyze your competitors extensively. You'll be able track reach, sentiment, conversations, and topics over time, getting data from a whole range of social sites - from Twitter to Reddit to news reports.

You can also get really detailed with rules and categories that will help you organize everything. Very soon you'll have a real-time dashboard that will help you keep updated on competitor activities and see how well they perform on social media.

Be sure to look at this from an owned (channels actually owned by a competitor) and unowned (posts from people outside the company) separately. They will often tell two very different stories.

Questions to consider:

What platforms are working for your competitors?

Are conversations different on different platforms?

What is your share of voice compared to your competitors'?

What content works?

What kind of language do they use?

Who do they interact it?

What's the sentiment and emotions around conversations?

What are the demographics of your competitor's followings?

Are they working with influencers (and to what success)?

Search engine optimization (SEO) analysis

It's important to see how your competitors are performing SEO-wise too. By SEO we mean search engine optimization. In other words, how well they're ranking in Google.

Google, and other search engines, can send huge amounts of traffic to a website and, by extension, can be a excellent source of revenue.

A lot of SEO tools will be able to give you an overview of a domain, citing key metrics such as the keywords they rank for and the links pointing to their site. We can't go into SEO in detail here, but we'll look at these two areas specifically for this guide (SEO is far, far bigger than this, so take some time to read Moz's beginner's guide if you're new to it).

Keywords

Looking at keywords first, what you'll want to do is write down a bunch of them that are relevant and important - the ones that convert the best, for example. These are the terms you're going to want to compete on.

As an example, we'll take an electrician from the city of Derby. A great way for them to get business will be to rank for terms like "derby electrician', and the same goes for all their competitors.

Be warned: searching in Google yourself, even in Incognito mode, will not always be accurate. Google will personalise results based on your profile, location, and other things. Don't take these results at face value.

To really do this properly, you'll need to use SEO tools

The outcome of this will be a good idea of how your various competitors are performing, how much effort they're putting into content and SEO, and what you need to keep up. It might even throw up some new competitors.

From here you can plan your own SEO work and get a content plan on the go. Here's a simplistic piece of advice, but a good starting point: Find out what your competitors do, then do it better.

In the below screenshot, you can see an example of a keywords list generated in Ahrefs. We've put in Google's website and you can see the terms they generate the most traffic from. You can also look at keywords by country and see the SERP results for each one too.

To assess your ultimate SEO competitors across thousands of industry keywords and trends, you can use a market intelligence tool like the one from Pi Datametrics. This also shows the keyword categories that can bring you the highest ROI, to give value-focus to your content strategy.

Of course if you're on a strict budget, a paid SEO tool might be out of the question. There is always Google's Search Console to help you do analysis of your own site. Unfortunately there won't be much in the way of competitors, but it's worth getting set up all the same.

Links and domains

A site's SEO performance is connected to how many links they get pointed to their site, and the number of sites who create those links. Again, this is simplified. Relevancy, what is linked to, and where from also play a big part (among loads of other things).

Knowing what links your competitors have got is useful for a number of reasons. First, it gives you an idea of what you'll need to do to beat them. Second, it gives you a list of sites you should try and get links from too. Third, it reveals the type of content that receives links.

Just like the keyword analysis, these three things can be used to guide your content strategy. What works and what doesn't changes from sector to sector, and this is the best way to find out what works in yours.

Finally, just to reiterate, SEO is a huge discipline. Do your research beyond links and domains as there's a lot more to it if you want to be really successful.

Questions to consider:

What keywords do they rank for?

What do your competitors rank for that you don't?

What content ranks well and attracts links?

How often are competitors releasing SEO-focused content?

What sites link to your competitors?

How have they achieved these links?

What content of yours is directly competing with theirs?

Work through the findings with your co-workers. Make sure the info is disseminated rather than sitting in some massive document and never looked at again. It's also important to keep it updated.

Another important resource to create are battlecards. These will be factsheets on your competitor's strengths and weaknesses, and are used specifically to convince potential customers or clients why you're better. They're an excellent way to get your sales team prepped and always on-message.

Here's a good run down on creating battlecards. We've also got info on competitive benchmarking, where this data will come in handy.

You can take this a step further and create full profiles of all your competitors that go beyond selling points. Here you can bring together all of the information you've uncovered in an ordered and useful manner.

The ultimate aim is to put all the research to good use. That means making it accesible and putting it into formats that your organisation can use. In other words, if someone asks who a certain competitor is, what information can you send them straight away?

A strong competitive analysis takes a lot of work, but the rewards are huge. It removes blind spots, helps you improve, and is essential for excelling in your industry. Make sure all your hard work doesn't go to waste.

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How to Do an Effective Competitive Analysis

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Definition: A competitive analysis is the process of categorizing and evaluating your competitors to understand their strengths and weaknesses in comparison to your own. In other words, it's not a complicated idea. It's common knowledge that the better you understand your competitors, the better chance you have of beating them.