Your brand success relies on your power to dominate the competition and claim the top seat in the industry. To rule over the online space, there is a myriad of things for you to scale to achieve that range- this includes understanding your customers, providing your audience with accurate content, and planning at a strategic level under the guidance of digital marketing professionals. Doing so will help you craft a perfect and winning marketing strategy for business growth. 

Online competitor research is one of the many ways that help companies plan their digital marketing strategies. This should be executed in the on-boarding stage. To improve strategies for digital marketing in India, if you need expert advice, consult our team.

It doesn’t matter if it’s your first step towards a digital footprint or if you have been starting to analyse the competition, it is okay to feel overwhelmed or baffled…Fret not! Following are the five tips for competitor research that will help improve your marketing growth and strategy:

FIND YOUR COMPETITORS

An SEO competitor is someone who ranks the primary search phrases in an organic manner that relates to your business. In many situations, a business’ real competitors and their SEO competitors don’t align and often cross industries. Gather a list of main search phrases that are relevant to your service or business, then search to find out who ranks for them. When a search result ranks for multiple search phrases, consider that as your main competitor. Additionally, enter keywords to identify who ranks, however, keep buyer’s behaviour in mind that changes vividly. Many prefer natural and organic language when looking up a product or service.

DON’T SHY AWAY FROM TOOLS

With technology making our lives easier and numerous competitor research tools, feel free to use them to get accurate and valuable insight into your competition. You can use these tools to analyse your competitor’s site and compare their ranking to yours, and some tools provide data about social signals and paid searches. For example, you can use SEMrush for researching your competitor’s ranking history, keywords, and search terms that they rank for. This amazing tool allows numerous free searches. 

LOOK FOR BACKLINKS

Once you have figured out the top SEO competitor, you need to check for their backlink portfolio. Backlinks play a valuable role, if they are healthy, they can elevate a website’s domain authenticity. However, if the links are of poor quality, the search engines classify them as spam and your site can drop in the ranking, in some cases, businesses have to deal with Google Penalty. How would you know if a backlink is healthy? 

–         Comes with follow tag 

–         Have content relevant to the landing page

–         Comes from a website with a high domain authority

BLOG ANALYSIS

Blogging is an important element of any digital marketing strategy. In an SEJ article, the author says ‘Blogging is Critical’ for business and ‘bland blog post won’t cut it’. It is advised to determine if the competitor’s blog is uninspiring or stuffed with bland keywords, or if their blog focuses on hot industry topics to resolve customers’ needs. Thanks to recent improvements in the smartphone’s voice search, content created to address minor concerns in organic language rank well and will convert too. 

DETERMINE SOCIAL MEDIA COMPETITORS

Finding and learning about your social media competitors is paramount to achieving your goals. The following are the winning reasons for having an active presence on social media channels:

–         Accessibility to the target audience

–         Generate valuable social signals for better SEO

–         Ability to promote your brand’s voice

–         Drives traffic to your website

–         Provides entry points into inbound workflows

Conclusion

Hope this digital marketing post contains all the information you need. Competitive research often appears daunting initially but it is an important part of running a successful business. When you have the best team on board and access to the right tools in your research process, you will find a way to winning a marketing strategy.