So your question is “How do you analyze a Competitor’s website?” well, Let’s discuss further.
There is a need to analyze a competitor’s website because it is an important part of any sound and well-informed business strategy. If a business or organization is not aware of its competitors then it would be difficult to determine which competitors are its biggest threats, how to beat them, or where to focus in the competition against them.
On the other hand, if a business assesses its competitors and the strategies adopted by them, it can help that business to stay ahead of them. It may be possible that a business might not have a well-defined strategy to assess its competitors in order to stay ahead.
In business, success is also due to a company’s competitive edge. This edge is determined by a company’s ability to understand the strength and weaknesses of its competitors and thereby readjusting its response to the changing market conditions.
If a business doesn’t involve itself in rigorous competitive analysis or doesn’t indulge in it much, then the business might risk itself falling behind its competitors.
Why analyze a website of a competitor?
In this age all companies have an online presence and therefore, being competitive online has become more important than ever. Potential customers compare and evaluate products or services on websites before they can do any real transaction. Therefore, what information a website displays and what selling strategies it adopts becomes important, and as they say first impressions are very important in such a scenario. Hence, analysis of all the competing websites becomes necessary.
To make an analysis better, it becomes better to ask a third party for the same task. This is because such an analysis conducted by third parties would be more objective. Sometimes, internal assessments can be prone to biases and make our evaluations less effective or even useless. Interviewing existing and prospective customers can give more insight into their needs and hence the content on the website could be altered and the related marketing strategies could be readjusted.
Working with a firm that has prior experience of working with our competitors can also offer valuable, first-hand insight into our competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. Such firms might not reveal confidential information about our competition, but they can help us better understand how our competition thinks and works.
How to analyze a competitor’s website?
A website competitive analysis may contain two parts: first, finding out who our competition is, and second, applying the competitor analysis worksheet.
Before conducting a competitive analysis, we need to measure our current website’s performance, identify our high-value customers and conduct customer interviews. Understanding our current situation and designing future efforts according to our goals help in analyzing our competition.
- Determining who our competitors are
The determination of competition would be based on our online competitive analysis. This online analysis would serve as a benchmark against which our company’s online presence would be measured.
Online competition changes over time, so any preconceived notions of who our competitors are have to be shed. Therefore, it becomes important to re-assess our competitors at regular intervals.
Three possible ways could be used to identify and verify who our competition is, they are:
First; talking to our customers can help us in the best possible way to identify our competition. A customer who has got experience of interacting with our competitor’s business processes can help us get a good insight.
A properly thought out questionnaire should be prepared to conduct a proper survey of such customers. Such a questionnaire may contain questions on customer’s research, his perceptions, other companies he came across during his search for certain products or services, etc. This can help in understanding a customer’s decision-making process and the customer’s perception of competing services.
Second; since the sales and marketing team interacts with prospects and customers on a daily basis, they can be a great resource. They can help us understand customer needs how the customer sees other products or services when compared to ours etc. The sales team could be asked to conduct regular interviews with prospects in order to gather more information and insight.
Third; We can use Google and other search engines to research more about our buyer persona. Such search engines could act as a great resource to understand what keywords are searched. Note down the name of the companies which appear during the organic search results, and these may be the possible competitors.
Once the potential competitors are identified and listed, they should be mentioned properly in a spreadsheet. In the spreadsheet, mark or rank the competing companies by some criteria and weight (there are many tools available online to rank and categorize competition). The higher up on the sheet a website is, the more traffic it gets. We should then focus our efforts only on our biggest competitors, say top 10 or 15 competitors depending on the need.
While evaluating competitors, it has to be ensured that there are no gaps in our research. For instance, was an important business objective overlooked? Was our competition targeting a different set of persons which we might not have targeted?
Many such questions should be asked and answers should be sought for them. This kind of assessment must be carried out to narrow the distance between us and our competition.
Once the list of competing websites has been compiled, then one needs to return to our customers. This is done in order to gain perspectives on how they see us and our competitor’s website. This can be a comprehensive and lengthy process. In such a case, it is better to compensate customers with some incentives.
The customers could be asked to rank in four main areas, they are User experience, Creativity, Technical, and Marketing. Understanding a customer’s view on these areas will help us get a picture of how our website compares and ranks to our competition.
If one is not able to get direct feedback from the customers, then an online survey could be used. Many online services can help us perform this task expeditiously. Such services, for a fee, would help us to customize a target survey pool of our choice.
After the competitor analysis
Only conducting a competitor analysis is not enough. We would have to incorporate the outcomes of such analysis to make our site perform better than our competition. We would have to develop strategies that keep in mind our website’s assets and liabilities.
And herein, a website’s SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis) comes into place. This SWOT analysis is the next step after a competitor’s analysis has been done. Through such analysis, a winning strategy could be devised.
