Competitor Analysis Framework: The 5-Step Guide You MUST Follow - YouTube

Digital marketing has changed everything

Years ago, it was near impossible to know competitor's marketing strategy

without having insider information

Today, it's a very different story

With competitive analysis tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush and SimilarWeb

You can learn anything and everything about your competitors

From keywords they're targeting to the way they're building links

All with a few clicks of a mouse

And that's exactly what I'm going to show you today step-by-step

I'm Julie from Sleeknote

The place where e-commerce marketers turn for more engagement and higher conversions

In this video, I'll show you how your competitors are acquiring, converting and retaining new customers

Plus so much more

Keep watching

Many struggle in business for years

Often, marketers search the web to learn how to analyze other sites’ marketing strategies

But time and time again, they find content that focuses on what to do rather than how to do it

This is not one of those videos

In this video, I'll walk you through five steps that will help you do an effective competitor analysis

Our first step is to identify your competitors

We all have companies we’re competing with for customers

These are your direct competitors

You’re probably familiar with many of them

But there’s likely a few you haven’t heard of

Discovering who you’re competing against is often as easy as typing one of your target keywords into Google

and seeing who shows up in the search engine results pages

Let’s say you’re a SaaS business building, billing and invoicing software for freelancers

Here’s what I found when I typed in “invoicing software”

Often, you will need to narrow your search by adding a “modifier” to your search query

Here’s what I found when I searched for “invoicing software for contractors”

Shortlist.co didn’t show for our initial search, but they did for our follow-up

It’s important to try multiple search queries until you’re confident

you’ve exhausted all variations of your keyword

Organic competitors are your second type of competitors

They’re the sites you’re competing with for keywords

If content marketing is an important acquisition channel for you, organic competitors will require a lot of attention

After all, if readers aren’t clicking on to your site, they’ll click on someone else’s

Once you have an overview of who you’re competing with

Create a spreadsheet and add any sites you’re going to monitor

Then, using a site like Ahrefs or SEMRush

Include key metrics like the number of referring domains, organic search traffic

and anything else you think might be useful

We like Airtable because there’s a feature to alternate between different views for your data

allowing you to specify how you look at your information

Next, you need to analyze competitors’ keywords

Today, 70% of the buyer’s journey begins online

And that journey begins with keywords

It’s no surprise, then, that 53% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority

In our experience, gaining an advantage in the SERPs is a game of one-upmanship

Identify keywords with a high search volume and traffic potential and create content targeting those keywords

Now I know what you’re thinking

“But how do I know which keywords to target?”

Simple

By “borrowing” your competitors’

As I mentioned before, it’s crucial you target the right keywords for your content

if you’re investing in content marketing

Much of this will be influenced by your industry, your buyer persona(s)

and more importantly, where they are in the customer journey

But a good part of it will also be influenced by what’s already working

And by that, I mean what your competitors are doing and achieving results with

This might be traffic they’re generating, keywords they’re targeting, links they’re acquiring

and the list goes on

Remember: you don’t need to reinvent the wheel

You don't need to reinvent the reel

Remember: you don’t need to reinvent the wheel; you need to do more of what works

Here’s an example

Let’s say you’re in the CRM niche and you’re using content to generate traffic

to your site in the hopes of converting a percentage of that traffic into customers

One option would be to analyze your competitor’s top pages

and identify potential target keyword opportunities

Here’s how to do that

First, go to Ahrefs and plug in a competitor’s URL

In this example, I’m using Pipedrive

Then go to “Top Pages” on the left hand-side

You now have a 30,000-foot overview of Pipedrive’s top performing content

Let’s take it a step further

They have an article on “cold calling scripts” that accounts for 55% of their traffic

Maybe there’s potential to outrank it?

To do that we first need to know the post’s target keyword

Usually, this is as simple as looking at the post’s permalink

As we can see, “cold calling scripts” is included in the permalink

So far, so good

Now, let’s determine if it’s a keyword worth prioritizing

Plug the keyword into Ahref’s Keyword Explorer

This will give you its volume, traffic potential, and other important metrics

With a healthy search volume and traffic potential, “cold calling scripts” is probably worth targeting

However, what's also important is its keyword difficulty

With only eight backlinks needed to rank in the top 10

There’s potential to rank well and generate a ton of traffic in the process

So, how could you outrank Pipedrive’s blog post?

One approach, as you’re probably fami..

One approach, as you’re probably familiar with by now, is to try “The Skyscraper Technique”

But here’s the thing

Often, it’s not enough to write content that’s better, more up-to-date, better designed or more thorough

Are you for real?

Being the best isn't enough?

What else do I need to do?

Babysit your kids?

Wash your car?

Anything?

After all, anyone can build on the number if it’s a list post

A better approach is to combine two topics

For example, we knew “email marketing” was a keyword we wanted to target

But due to its keyword difficulty, we knew it was going to be hard to rank for

So, we added a modifier “e-commerce” and approached it from another angle

The keyword didn’t change, but the audience became more targeted

Incidentally, it's now one of the most popular blog posts on our blog

Many sites pay for keywords

And if they do, it’s likely many of them have high search volume and traffic potential

Granted, it isn’t always possible

but when it works, it gives you a deeper insight into a competitor’s acquisition strategy

To access a competitor’s paid keywords

Type in a competitor URL in Ahrefs and go to “Paid Search > PPC Keywords”

Here’s an overview for Pipedrive’s paid keywords

As you can see, “sales funnel template” gets a decent search volume

Could you create content targeting that keyword?

Of course you could, validating blog post topics is only the beginning

But it will give you a solid foundation to build from when creating content

Our third step is to determine our competitors’ link building strategy

Look

You can have the best content in your industry

But if no one is linking to it it’s unlikely to have any success

Link building is more important than ever

But with 2 million blog posts published every day, increasing your site’s visibility is getting harder

So, how do you outperform your competitors?

By analyzing their backlink profile

No two sites are the same

Some brands acquire links naturally

Others work hard to build links through outreach and other link building strategies

So, with that in mind, you need to determine how a competitor

is building links and whether it’s something you can model

An e-commerce site like Birchbox builds a ton of links through content

Others, rely on good ol’ fashioned PR

Here are high authority sites linking to Freshly, an American meal delivery service

Analyzing a competitor’s link profile can tell you a lot about their growth and even their CEO campaigns

CEO, God

It's not a CEO it's a SEO

Even their SEO campaigns

For instance, let’s return to our Freshly example

If we analyze their referring domains, we can see one month saw a sharp increase in activity

A jump like that can be due to a number of reasons

In Freshly’s case, they received an investment from Nestlé

and many authority sites covered the story including The New York Times and The Neue Zürcher Zeitung

Of course, examples like these are rare and hard to model

So let’s look at another example, one that’s likely a result of an outreach campaign

Similar to Freshly, Ties.com also saw a dramatic increase in referring domains, only it wasn’t accidental

Around that time, Ties.com created an infographic around one of their most frequently asked questions

“How do I tie a necktie?”

While it’s impossible to know for certain, it’s likely Ties.com did a ton of outreach to promote it

because in the months that followed they acquired over 1,000 backlinks

If you’ve ever tried to build a link to your site, you’ll know timing is everything

If a site has recently linked to a competitor

They’re more likely to link to you if your content is better, more thorough and so forth

That’s why I recommend you set aside time once a week

to review any new link building opportunities you can capitalize on

You can do that, for example, by using the “alert” feature in Ahrefs

Moving on, our fourth step is to reverse-engineer our competitors’ onboarding emails

A company’s email marketing strategy will tell you a lot about their goals

and why they’re sending the emails they’re sending

After all, each email will have a specific goal in the hopes of nudging you to become a customer

If you’re serious about analyzing your competitors’ email marketing strategies

I recommend creating a new email account specifically for collecting emails and creating labels in Gmail

Without either, your inbox will quickly become overcrowded

making it harder to review competitor emails

You might be doing this already, but if you’re not

Go to a competitor’s site and opt in for a lead magnet or join their newsletter

After you’ve gone through their onboarding flow, ask yourself

How frequently do they email?

What types of marketing email do they send?

How do they write their email subject lines?

What are their email calls-to-action (CTAs)?

Going through competitor campaigns and workflows will give you opportunities

to pick up on any little details you wouldn’t have known otherwise

The last step is to piece together your competitors’ remarketing strategy

According to research from Forrester, 96% of people who visit your site don’t convert to a lead or sale

Worse yet, 70% of visitors that add a product to their shopping cart

abandon the process before completing their order

No, wait

Wait

Come back

Please

Please, come back

It’s no surprise, then, remarketing is a go-to strategy for many marketers

And Larry Kim is no exception

In fact, in 18 months, remarketing allowed Wordstream to increase their

repeat visitors by 50%, boost conversion by 51%, and increase their on-site time by 300%

While analyzing a competitor’s remarketing campaigns isn’t as easy as the preceding steps, it is possible

But you need to be patient because it takes time

To get remarketed, go to a competitor’s site

For this example, I’m using ReferralCandy

Shortly after going onto their page, log in to Facebook and pay attention to your news feed and sidebar

Guess what I found in my news feed after visiting Referral Candy’s site?

If a competitor’s remarketing to you, it’s worth taking a screenshot of their ad

as it's likely they'll show you different ads on different days

depending on the length of their retargeting flow

Click on the link and make note of where they’re directing you

Are they pushing you to download a lead magnet, begin a free trial or something else?

When I click on ReferralCandy’s ad

I’m redirected to a landing page to start a free trial

Sometimes, clicking the URL will also hint to whom they’re targeting and why

Compass, for instance, retargeted me because they viewed me as a potential partner for their program

Asana, on the other hand

viewed me as a potential customer because we’re a customer of a competitor, Favro

Granted, information like the above isn’t always available

But if it is and you have the patience to go through their marketing funnel, top to bottom

It might give you the advantage you’re looking for

Doing a competitor analysis is a proven and reliable way of growing your business

But it’s important to mention here analyzing your competitors will only get you so far

You have everything you need to compete with them, that much is a given

But, to surpass them, you need to be original

As Srini Rao says, “Don’t be the best, be the only”

So, did you learn something new from today’s video?

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Now I want to turn it over to you

How do you do your competitor analysis?

Which competitor analysis tool are you going to use?

Either way, let me know by leaving a comment below right now

Bye