Audit of your competitors in the online market

Auditing competitors and the online market is a piece of work that requires cold prudence and an integrated approach. Competitors need to be known by sight and their activities can be monitored remotely, and counteraction should only be initiated in the event of direct attacks. We will talk about how to identify competitors and what to do next with the information collected.

WHY IS IT NECESSARY TO STUDY YOUR COMPETITORS?

Competitors – online stores, companies, suppliers from whom your target audience can place orders. They have a similar or identical product range, similar prices and a set of unique internal services. Competitor analysis allows you to solve a number of important problems:

identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the business;

defining a sales strategy;

studying the assortment, internal offers and additional services;

identifying priority keywords for promotion in search engines;

collecting customer opinions;

determination of effective advertising channels, others.

After completing the analysis, you will be able to find answers to a number of important questions:

What helps competitors sell more?

Why does a website rank higher in SEO?

Is an online store or company a threat to your business?

Why do customers place orders from another seller?

What do you need to change in your online store to gain a competitive advantage?

What actions need to be taken to strengthen the business and give impetus to development?

The nature of the questions depends on the goals that need to be achieved. The analysis helps to identify shadow strategies, such as dumping or increasing the number of positive reviews. Our instructions contain working methods for identifying sites that compete in SEO.

CLASSIFICATION

An e-commerce business owner must categorize competitors clearly. A small online store selling ordinary everyday goods cannot compete with market giants, whose name is constantly heard. Based on this information, the following classification of competitors can be made:

basic. These are companies and online stores that sell similar products in a specific region. They have similar prices, work with the same target audience as the initiator of the analysis;

indirect. They work in related niches (bed linen and feather products, video and music, perfumes and cosmetics, others), as well as in other regions;

niche leaders. This group includes market giants who do not need unnecessary advertising and have a stable audience of buyers. The giants have a substantial budget for promotion; their sites occupy the first lines of search results for high-frequency queries. A small business will not be able to compete with stores of the scale of Ozon, DNS, AliExpress, so you should not rely on them in matters of SEO promotion. Analysis of such sites will help you gain useful ideas that will form the basis of a strategy for communicating with clients and expanding the list of internal services.

Attention should be paid to the first group, the second and third are introductory, allowing you to assess the market and customer requirements. The main competitor sites that are in the TOP 10 of search results are valuable. Source: webbrost

EFFECTIVE WAYS TO HELP FIND AND ANALYZE COMPETITORS

USING A SEARCH ENGINE

Using a search engine is the easiest and fastest way to lead you to competing sites. To solve this problem you need:

select priority keywords from your semantic core;

add a regional link if you identify indirect competing sites;

create a table in which the data collected during the analysis will be entered.

It is worth searching on Google, because these systems have different results, which will allow you to identify the maximum number of online stores, business cards and other commercial resources with similar semantics and target audience. It is recommended to use basic queries and word forms, adhering to a number of recommendations:

Don't forget to search in Incognito mode. Using the mode, you can get the clearest picture possible, not distorted by your personal data, geolocation and history of previous requests (all this data is recorded by Google). The results will not be adjusted to your preferences and experience, which will ensure the accuracy of the result. The launch mechanism differs in different browsers; during connection, look for the “New window in incognito mode” section;

set the search region. Setting up a region is necessary to accurately identify companies that are direct competitors. The recommendation is especially relevant for entrepreneurs who do business in one region, but carry out the analysis from another. You can use a simple extension to set your region in Google;

analysis of the entire site, not just landing pages. During a search through the SERP, you will be taken to a landing page, but it will give a minimal amount of quality of information, so it is necessary to analyze the entire site. It is recommended to take into account the SEO core for all pages, the age of the domain, the volume of external links, the presence of an internal blog and other characteristics that have a direct impact on positions in search results;

issuance segmentation. When searching, do not consider sites that are marked as “advertising”, because they take up paid space, which has nothing to do with SEO. Also separate aggregators, catalogues, review sites and other sites that are informational from commercial sites.

Be sure to record the collected data in a table. Check the sites found for relevance, study the assortment. After collecting data, you can move on to the active phase of action by sending a secret shopper to your competitors. In this case, you will be able to obtain additional data on the quality of work of managers, cost and delivery time, internal bonuses - benefits and comfort that the client receives.

ANALYSIS AUTOMATION

Manual sampling is an effective tool, but if you don’t have time, you can use automation services. They identify competing sites based on keywords, and also generate reports on niche leaders in a specific region or throughout the country. Additionally, services can perform the following types of analysis:

data collection in backlinks;

attendance information;

determining the number of indexed pages;

information about the age and visibility of the site;

search engine optimization data;

identifying traffic sources;

loading speed on desktop and mobile devices, others.

Some services, based on the collected data, form recommendations regarding the SEO core, the occurrence of keywords and other optimization features. To perform the analysis, you can use the potential of paid and online services that guarantee transparency of the results.

FINALLY

An analysis of competing resources should be performed several times a year, which depends on the niche and dynamics of business development. During analysis, it is recommended to combine manual and automatic checking, because the results of the latter may be inaccurate. The work requires minimal financial investment (for paid verification services), its results form the basis of global decisions - from search engine optimization to personnel changes. Market and competitor analysis can be carried out independently, and efficiency is demonstrated by delegating the task to professionals who can not only collect data, but also develop a strategy for further development.