Confirmation of competitors

Most businesses think they have a good understanding of their competitive set, but looking at the websites users visit before your site can often lead to new insights, in particular in smaller markets where you often have less local knowledge. Also through improved understanding of who your customers see as viable contenders for their purchases so you can respond appropriately.

Use Google Analytics to view referral domains driving your traffic, do you spot new competitors or influencers in your sector?

Sign up to competitor digital marketing

Understand competitor strategy and tactics by signing up to their enewsletters, social profiles and setting up free or paid competitor monitoring tools such as Google Alerts or the ones listed in the Kissmetrics blog below.

Lifting the lid on competitor’s tactics

A better understanding of digital tactics competitors are using and what is working well for the them, helps you assess if your tactics could be improved. A few examples below:

One of the most comprehensive tools Similarweb allows you to see a lot of details about your competitors. I’d start here.

The tool SEMrush allows you to input competitors and view their organic keywords, paid ads and display ads and their link building. Free for topline data, $70 per month for full reporting.

Ahrefs shows competitor’s backlinks and referral sources and notifies you of mentions of your keywords. Engage with the top 10 – 20 back links to get links to your site incorporated for example by commenting on blogs. Ahrefs also shows what content is working best. All round a great tool to support SEO optimisation.

Another tool Whatrunswhere  show you real time data of all digital ads running globally so you can spot competitor’s ads (and also monitor your own). Best for larger advertisers and ad planners as a paid subscription.

Free Builtwith tell you what software your competitors are running, useful to know what plugins and to understand their digital sophistication.

Here is a very thorough guide of all competitor snooping tools available today. Use it to stay competitive and as a basis for your GROWTH tactics.

 

Target your competitor’s customers & prospects

This can work very effectively, for example; Facebook offers the ability to target ads at users who liked competitors, or users that share profiles of those that liked the competitor. Twitter  the same. Set up a retargeting campaign based on visitors to competitors’ urls. You can attach your YouTube ad before competitor’s videos in many instances. Also research your competitor’s LinkedIn connections. More tips here.

 

Competitor pricing

Useful for larger companies particularly retail, a price comparison tool CompetitorMonitor.

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