While listing out your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, be sure to get feedback from your employees and customers – or even future customers about the existing market.
With these resources to guide you, you’ll be able to easily draw solutions to the problems presented, and have an opportunity to address some of the areas you may need to work on.
What you decide to include in your competitive analysis is ultimately up to you. Even though we’ve attached a template with a list of areas we feel are most important to cover, you’re free to add and take away as suits your needs.
In general though, you’ll want to come away from a competitive analysis with a sense of who your competitors are, including their value propositions, target markets, what services they offer and/or lack, their pricing, where and how they’re marketing, and the success or failure of their overall efforts.
First, you need a basic overview and understanding of your competitors’ business. How long have they been around? What are their office hours? What locations do they serve? How many employees do they have? What’s their value position, or how they’re positioning themselves in the marketplace?
All other relevant competitor information can usually be found on the company’s website, social media or other listings like Angi and Linkedin. For all other information, you might need to go digging by looking at job openings to learn more about their company structure, or ask around. You can even try hiring employees away from competitors or teaming up with their partners to learn more about how these companies operate.
Ask yourself: Is there any specific group of people my competition seems to be trying to attract? You’ll want to ask yourself questions like:
Sometimes it’s easy to get a sense of how customers feel about a company. You can simply check their reviews and comments on a business’s social media page or it’s widely known they’re notorious for poor business practices.
Other times, you may need to go digging and do more extensive, hands-on research. You can try conducting a survey among your competitors’ customers, suppliers, or even their employees. Or you can call and get a general sense of what a customer’s impression would be. Do they respond quickly? Do they seem prepared, professional?
What services do your competitors offer? Are there any ways you and your competitors’ services differ? For example, even if your competitor provides the same service, it doesn’t mean they’re targeting the same audience.
Say you and your competitor both offer tile flooring services. Their focus might be on quick and affordable solutions, while yours might be durability and a wide range of customization options. Or there might be certain discounts and perks you can offer to give you an edge over your competition.
This research can also help you pinpoint services you’re capable of performing but might not have thought about showcasing. Maybe you discover another plumber in your area who offers to install water purifiers. Now, when you build your website, you can mention you offer this in your list of services or know to mention it to customers as an upsell option.
While it’s important to price your services competitively, you should never differentiate yourself on price alone. There’s almost always someone who will do the work cheaper. Instead, highlight the value of the service you offer and what makes you the best choice. Customers aren’t always “buying” something as much as considering their purchase an investment.
Pro-Tip: See if there is an opportunity to specialize your services. Businesses who specialize can often charge more due to stronger expertise and higher-quality service.
This is where your customers come in. Customers love sharing their opinion and feeling like a part of your success. Periodically ask customers if they considered anyone else before choosing you. Then ask about how they found out about your competitors. Or simply inquire if there’s anything they believe you could do better to get the word out about your business.
When researching your audience, you’ll generally want to look at four areas:
Consult an SEO specialist when analyzing your competitors’ websites. With a professional, you’ll get better results and all the necessary tools to take a deep-dive into your competitors’ keywords so you can begin outranking them on Google.
An SEO specialist will help you discover which websites are linking to your competitors so you know where to advertise or can reach out to those websites to link your own. They’ll also be able to tell which keywords your competitors are ranking for, which can open up a world of possibilities about which services you should highlight.
Next, you’ll want to look at your competitors’ social media presence and pinpoint which social media platforms your competitors are most active on. Using their page likes and followers you’ll be able to see how popular the account is. Generally, 300-400 followers is considered good for a local business, but the real indication of the page’s success depends on how popular their posts are and whether posts are getting likes, comments, and shares. This shows genuine engagement from followers. From here, you can also make a note of how often the business posts and the top five topics their content covers, like maintenance tips or discounts.
Are your competitors listed in any local directories? This includes everything from lead purchasing websites like Angi and HomeAdvisor to business listings like Yelp and Google My Business. How many reviews do they have? The reviews on your Google Business page are particularly important as this helps boost your business’s credibility in Google’s eyes. Business directories, meanwhile, often make it easy to see which certifications, awards, badges, and licensing other businesses may have.
In the interest of transparency, Facebook now allows its users to see what ads specific users are running on Facebook as well as when they were launched. Using this information, you can spy on competitors’ ad copy, landing pages, and even search through their ads for specific keywords.
Social Mention is a real-time social media monitoring app you can use to see mentions of you and your competitors’ brand across the web.
For $33/month, this tool helps you see which keywords your competitors are bidding on. You can also get a rough estimate of how many PPC clicks they get a month and see their top paid keywords for free.
With this website, you can see a list of all the websites that link to your competitors’ website – free! Use this tool to pinpoint which websites you should list your site on and who to reach out to for a listing.
If you can’t afford to hire an SEO specialist, this guide will walk you through how to do an SEO competitor analysis in detail with a handy template you can download to help you along the way. Note: In order to use this guide, you’ll need ahrefs.com’s SEO tool, which offers a week-long $7 trial.
If you don’t want to purchase Ahrefs, Moz offers a free tool that can help you discover your website competitors’ domain authority, linking domains, and top ranking keywords.
Now that you’re armed with all the tools you need, you can finally dive into researching your competitors. Remember: At the end of the day, this comparison is aimed at pinpointing your business’ specific strengths and weaknesses so you can start making smart marketing decisions, so don’t get caught up in the details of learning the ins and outs of another company.
