Competitors website analysis

Competition on the internet is getting more and more aggressive, and to be in the lead, you have to constantly follow your competitors’ websites. In this article, we will review what is most important when analyzing your competitor’s website and suggest some good tools and services for that.

Why Analyze Competitor’s Websites?

Competitor analysis is, of course, an important tool in product launching to the market and in the development of any business promotion strategy. It allows one to solve many significant tasks: to identify the main competitors and appraise their potential, to understand with whom to compete for high positions and attention of customers, and develop an effective development strategy with the help of obtained data.

However, it is good to know one’s competitors. You will have to study the sites very closely, do some comparative analyses, and apply that new knowledge to enhance your resource. Research helps you understand industry trends and takes uniquely shaping best practices around the project characteristics. Thanks to it, you are going to get your website ahead of the competitors and even outperform them by attracting more customers and consolidating your lead in the market.

Following are a few of the main benefits which can be derived from the analysis of competitor websites:

• Link Environment Optimisation: This service is quite useful and will contribute a lot to the visibility of your website in search engine rankings. This may open up newer possibilities to enhance your link profile by studying how competitors manage their links.
• Content Strategy: This will help you understand what topics and formats work for engaging audiences by looking at your competitors. In that respect, you’re able to draw out a plan of action to create very relevant content that will catch the interest of your users.
• Understanding a Product and Business: Comparing competitors’ products and services, you can find out strengths and weaknesses. You will manage to improve your solutions and offer more favourable conditions to your customers.
• Effective Usage of Paid Traffic: Studying competitors’ methods of attracting paid traffic will give you ideas for optimization of your own advertising campaigns and ways of using your marketing budget more effectively.
• User Behavior: Analyzing user behavior at competitors’ websites you will understand what interface elements and features are most usable and appealing for visitors.
• Technical Aspects: Making research of technical characteristics of competitors’ websites, such as design and usability, you will be able to enhance your website and make it more interesting for users.

Searching and Analyzing Competitors’ Websites

If you operate in a small town or within a narrowly niched business, then you are likely to know who your main competitors are. This would make compiling a list of your competitors very easy because the number of players in the market can almost be counted. However, if you have a regional business with an already established niche and you want to improve your online presence, choosing competitors to analyse starts becoming tricky.

It is relevant to establish:

• What companies should one benchmark? Perhaps with large enterprises? It will only make sense if the aim is to learn from the best practices and functionality to aspire to.
• Are sites advertised all over Russia or just in your region?
• Are you interested in competitors with related businesses?

It depends on time and resources you are willing to invest into research. In this regard, it is advisable to include at least 5-10 sites. Ideally, proceed with the search for competitor sites in the Google search engine by selecting key requests related to your niche.

It is important in this process to consider the four types of competitors in the analysis process:

• Direct Competitors: The firms that trade in the same product and within the same geographical region.
• Indirect Competitors: The firms which sell similar products.
• Capital Companies: Businesses from big cities may propose some interesting ideas and approaches even if they are not direct rivals.
• Market Leaders: Big players from which one can learn successful strategies and tools.

You have to search for competitors in incognito mode so personalisation would be switched off for search results, and contextual advertising would not be taken into account. Such an approach will enable you to get a full view of the competitive environment and create a strategy that will help your business not only catch up with the level of your competitors but also outstrip them.

Did you identify your main rivals? Now it is time to research and compare their sites in detail, to achieve the high positions in the search results and attract more users. Below we would like to review the main parameters that should be checked and recorded when analysing them.

Competitors’ Website Structure Analysis

The structure of your competitors’ site will help you understand what queries they cover and what sections and pages they have. In such a way, you’ll be able to decide what should be added to your site and what can be removed. After analyzing the sites of your competitors, you might come up with a conclusion that your structure should be simple and intuitive. Another relevant feature is a smart SEO filter. It enables users to:

• Ease in finding the right products with many parameters, such as by brand, equipment type, or training level.
• Cover lots of low-frequency queries that will increase the visibility of the site in search engines.

The analysis of the structure of competitors should be even more detailed if your company’s website suggests offering services. It is best to start forming the structure of the site at the stage of its creation and the development of the semantic kernel. Then, later it won’t be necessary to make global changes, and you will be able to provide users with a convenient site from the very beginning.

Content Analysis of Competitors’ Websites

Content analysis of a competitor’s website is a very time-consuming but highly significant process because content is a key ranking factor and is at the heart of effective promotion. It is not enough just to see if texts are present on the competitors’ site. It is necessary to study their content in depth: from headlines to the uniqueness of product cards.

Here are some key parameters for analyzing and comparing content with your project:

Texts on Competitors’ Websites

First of all, assess whether the main page of competitors has any texts. For sections and subsections as well: pay attention to volume, uniqueness, and quality.

It is relevant that texts don’t stop at search engine optimisation but are useful for users. They should describe the customer’s benefits from choosing your products or services. For visitors, site texts are primarily a source of information, so they should correspond to their requests, be easy to read, and informative. Having analyzed the texts on main pages of competitors, you can make conclusions about what texts you should write. For example, if it turns out that the optimum length of text for the main page in your niche is 4000-6000 characters, then a more detailed description of the benefits to the customer can be emphasized instead of those of your competitors. The texts analysis by sections and subsections will show their role in promotion. Such texts will help not only to tell about the advantages of your offer but also to increase the relevance of pages due to implemented key queries. Filling up sections and subsections with texts can bring good results, especially for low- and medium-frequency queries. This also places texts in the areas that promote page relevancy, satisfy the user’s information needs, and help improve your SEO, while creating a good user experience.

Keyword

The analysis of the keywords your competitors promote is a critical point for the development of the semantic core and building up the structure of your site. One should not forget keywords in texts, tags, titles, hyperlinks, and ad campaigns of the competitors. Yes, you can manage to analyze competitors’ semantics on your own; nevertheless, this takes great expenses of time. That is why it is highly recommended to use special services which will enable you to automate this process and investigate different site parameters, among which are keywords.

Metadata of the Site

Analysing metadata of competitors’ sites will help to create an effective strategy of promotion. Great attention is to be given to the Title and Description tags, and H1-H3 headings.

Checking how these tags are populated, optimized, keyword presence, and placement – all this will help understand how your competitors are gaining good positions in search engines.

While analysing metadata, direct attention to:

• Title: It should be informative, with keywords and attractive for users. Check the length of the tag, the presence of keywords.
• Description: In a few words describe the content of the page and insert keywords. Description does not influence the ranking directly but it may raise clickability in search engine results.
• Headlines H1-H3: They structurize the text on the page, making it more understandable for users and search engines. Analyze the headlines of the competitors: Are there keywords in the headlines, are they informative, do they improve user experience?

Therefore, it is advisable to study the metadata of all pages but start with the homepage, main sales pages, and product or service cards. It is possible to analyze tags and headings both manually and using different services.

Product Cards on the Website

If the product cards are unattractive, uninformative, or unaesthetic, then this will definitely lead to a big loss in sales. It would be wonderful to carefully analyze the competitors’ sites for product cards and make the cards even better by adding unique ingredients and enhancing the quality of information presentation.

By analyzing product cards, consider the following:

• Descriptions: See if they are close to standard solutions and whether they are keyword-optimized. Unique descriptions that bring useful information and emphasize the benefits of a product have a bigger chance of attracting and retaining customers, especially if the competitors’ descriptions are just a copy-paste from the websites of manufacturers.
• Photos: A photo of the product is the first visual contact of the customer with the product. The photos on your website should be of good quality and fully represent the product. It’s very useful to have several photos that show the product from different perspectives – it raises customer confidence and their desire to buy.
• Parameters: The product cards should be functional and convenient for the customer. It is necessary to provide the opportunity to choose parameters, for example: size, colour, additional options.
• Video: Video reviews and product demos can substantially raise a product card’s attractiveness due to greater accuracy in the customer’s view of a product and benefits and features accompanying it.
• Testimonials: Testimonials help new customers make their choice, but it also boosts your website SEO by user-generated content. Quite often, customers pay much attention to the opinions of other people. Testimonials can raise conversion rates substantially.

If your competitors don’t have a video review – add one. If the description is boring and standard – create a fascinating and detailed one. If there are no reviews – set up such a feature.

Site Blog

Check the presence of a blog and help on the competitor’s website. It is important to analyze:

• How often articles are published,
• What sections are present,
• How unique and optimized the texts are.

It will help to present you as an expert in your segment with regular qualitative content publication: increase the trust of users and attract additional traffic. But in those cases when the site provides services, a blog is especially important, because there is no option to expand infinitely the semantic core for commercial requests. That’s the point where a blog will help attract traffic for informational keywords.

Apart from this blog, the help or FAQ section will be analysed in a competitor’s website. This allows a user to find the answers to frequently asked questions in a jiffy and hence increases the ease of a user. One can add details about shipping and returns, modes of payment, guarantees, and all other information that customers generally enquire about to the help section.

It is a blog and help desk-areas that shouldn’t be underestimated. Provide in-depth research of your competitors to analyze what is missed on their sites. Improve these points on your website. Regulate updates of content on a constant basis; quality, optimized texts will help you win more traffic and lead the visitors to your customers.

Domain’s Age

Despite popular belief that old and new sites have equal chances for high rankings, practice often shows that older sites tend to have some distinct advantages, such as:

• A large number of backlinks,
• An established reputation,
• Steady traffic.

That doesn’t mean new sites are doomed to fail. With effective strategies, new websites can still compete and rank well. However, older domains typically have more established SEO signals, which can provide a boost in search rankings.

Competitor Website Technical Characteristic Analysis

Technical characteristics analysis is one of the most complex aspects of competitor research. It requires knowledge in technical SEO and can be time-consuming for those without much experience. Nevertheless, this analysis is invaluable in optimizing your site to rank better in search engines.

Technical optimization affects several important aspects of website performance, including:

• Download speed,
• Ease of use,
• Indexation by search engines,
• Overall performance.

All of these directly impact SEO and user experience. A poorly optimized website may lose significant traffic, even if it has great content. Ensuring that your site is technically sound can give it an edge in search engine rankings and increase user satisfaction.

Presence of SSL Certificate

Having an SSL certificate for your website is not just an additional bonus but a mandatory element of any serious website today. SSL ensures a secure connection between the server and the client, which protects the data being sent. Many providers offer SSL certificates at affordable prices, with simple installation instructions, making this an easy upgrade for most websites.

Presence of Micro-Markups on Site

Another key step in optimization is testing for the presence and correctness of semantic micro-markup. Micro-markups allow you to structure key data (e.g., contact info, product cards, and articles) in a way that helps search engines understand and display this information more effectively in search results. Proper micro-markups can increase your site’s visibility and click-through rate by presenting richer search snippets.

Page Load Speed

Page load speed is a critical factor for both SEO and user experience. Websites that load faster typically rank better in search engines. You should regularly test the page load speed of your competitors’ websites across desktops and mobile devices using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Pingdom. Similarly, you should aim to optimize your own website’s load speed to achieve the best possible performance, which can directly impact SEO and user engagement.

Mobile Optimization

Optimizing your website for mobile devices is essential since most users now access websites via smartphones and tablets. Having a responsive mobile version is no longer an optional feature but a fundamental requirement. Even if your competitors do not have a mobile-optimized site, you must implement one to improve user experience and boost your site’s position in search engine results.

Universal Site Analysis Tools

Comprehensive site analysis tools allow you to analyze both your competitors’ websites and your own. One such powerful tool is Ahrefs, which offers various capabilities for evaluating SEO and other aspects of a website:

• Site Explorer: Analyzes the backlink profile, site structure, organic and paid traffic. It helps identify the most successful keywords and pages driving the most traffic.
• Keywords Explorer: A tool for researching billions of keywords and determining their SEO potential to quickly identify valuable keywords.
• Content Explorer: Helps in identifying content ideas and link-building opportunities by analyzing over 15 billion web pages in the Ahrefs database.
• Site Audit: Scans websites for over 160 predefined technical and SEO issues, providing recommendations for improvement.
• Rank Tracker: Monitors the rankings of your website and competitors on Google in various locations, helping you track progress and identify areas for improvement.

Ahrefs also provides a wide range of educational resources, including blogs, YouTube videos, online courses, and webinars, to help both novice and experienced SEO professionals improve their skills and website performance.

Paid Traffic Information Analysis

Understanding your competitors’ paid traffic strategies is crucial for improving your own advertising efforts. Special attention should be paid to contextual advertising in search engines, as well as other sources like social media platforms. Study where your competitors’ ads appear, what keywords they target, and how their campaigns perform. Based on this analysis, refine your own paid traffic campaigns to optimize ad spend, identify new keywords, and discover new platforms or sites to advertise on. This will help you maximize the return on investment (ROI) for your paid advertising campaigns.

Link Profile Analysis

One of the most effective ways to improve your SEO is by analyzing the link profile of your competitors. This helps you identify high-quality domains and authoritative resources where your competitors are gaining backlinks. It also provides insight into the types of content that attract inbound links. Analyzing these backlinks will allow you to target similar high-authority sites and build your own link profile. This, in turn, can boost your site’s credibility and search engine rankings.

Presence in Directories and Maps

Check whether your competitors’ websites are listed in popular online directories and maps, such as Google My Business. Websites that are listed in such directories enjoy increased visibility, especially in local search results. Pay close attention to how complete and accurate their profiles are, including contact details, photos, and regular updates. By optimizing your own profiles on these platforms, you can enhance your local SEO, improve your credibility, and attract more targeted traffic.

Conclusions

In general, when analyzing your competitors’ websites, focus on both general features and specific areas that are critical for SEO and user engagement. Key areas to analyze include:

• Domain age,
• Website traffic,
• Content quality and structure,
• Site performance and technical optimizations,
• Link profile,
• Social signals,
• Paid traffic and advertising strategies,
• Presence in local directories and maps.

By conducting regular competitor website analyses, you can uncover valuable insights and opportunities for improving your own website. This will allow you to enhance SEO, optimize user experience, and stay ahead of the competition in the digital landscape.

How Can You Build off Your Competitors with Crowdy Chatbot?

In today’s digital economy, businesses must engage with their customers effectively throughout the entire purchase journey. Crowdy is an innovative solution that helps companies convert website traffic into real sales by leveraging advanced technologies and mechanisms.

Instant Interaction and Increased Customer Satisfaction

The Crowdy chatbot provides immediate responses to user inquiries, ensuring visitors receive information about products or services instantly. This immediate engagement boosts user satisfaction and interest, increasing the likelihood of continued interaction and conversion.

Personalized Offers and Analytics

Crowdy can analyze customer behavior and provide personalized product or service recommendations. This helps businesses tailor their offerings to match customer interests, resulting in higher chances of closing a sale.

Integration with Analytics for Strategic Planning

Integrating the Crowdy chatbot with your website’s analytics system enables you to gather valuable customer data. This information can be used to fine-tune marketing strategies, optimize customer engagement, and improve sales conversion.

Optimizing the Sales Funnel

As part of your sales funnel, Crowdy helps attract visitors and convert them into paying customers. This not only improves sales but also enhances overall business performance, leading to significant revenue growth.

Long-Term Benefits of Crowdy

Integrating Crowdy into your website is a strategic move that enhances customer loyalty, builds trust, and helps sustain long-term business growth. By creating more meaningful interactions with users, Crowdy helps you optimize customer experiences and drive continuous sales growth.

Incorporating the Crowdy chatbot into your website helps you convert every click into an opportunity, giving you a competitive edge in the digital economy.