Listen to the free webinar ‘How to Analyse the Competition’, which was presented in May by our Key Account Manager, Pavel Quaiser. At AITOM, we conduct detailed analyses of competitors’ websites as part of the initial studies for our clients’ projects, and in this webinar we summarise our experience and the key steps involved in producing a high-quality competitive analysis. Or read a brief summary and browse your competitors’ websites today. Every bit of inspiration counts and moves you forward!
3 basic steps to competitor analysis…
… which will inspire you to improve your website in just a few dozen minutes:
What do other websites look like?
Find the websites of your biggest competitors and try to look at them as if you were a target customer. Gradually identify what caught your attention and what, conversely, put you off. How is the website laid out and where do the conversion paths lead? How does the design strike you and what caught your eye? A number of other questions may also come to mind:
- Do they have any special offers on their website? For example, a free quote, a catalogue sent to you, a loyalty discount…?
- Are there any special features, such as an interactive calculator?
- Does the website have a specific section for a particular customer group, e.g. B2B?
Whatever catches your eye on another website, the next step is to carefully consider whether people actually use it and whether they would like to use the same thing on your site. It often happens that companies invest in a tool that looks appealing and useful but, unfortunately, fails to generate a real response.
To find out how a specific idea would actually work in practice, point 2 is a great starting point:
User testing and telephone surveys
The fact that competitors have something on their website does not necessarily mean that people are actually looking for it or need it. It is easy to slip into making comparisons and wanting your website to be better than ‘the others’. However, if we do not consider the reasons behind it, simply copying specific elements could do more harm than good. User testing and telephone surveys of both existing and potential customers for a specific project provide direct answers to the question of when a client chooses a competitor’s website and, more importantly, why. You can find out everything from the website’s existing, future and former customers. This will help you:
- Discover whether customers get lost on the website
- Find out what information they are really interested in
- Understand the real motives behind their decisions
How to analyse a competitor’s website?
Comparing competitor websites involves many hours of work. For example, we can find out how competitors utilise organic search and, consequently, how well their SEO is implemented. How their meta descriptions are written and what arguments they use in them. Or what kind of traffic they generate. Marketing tools such as Collabim, Marketing Miner, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, SimilarWeb and others are well suited to answering these questions.
Collabim occupies a special place among tools for monitoring competitor websites. It is a tool that helps streamline project management and, for some, even aids in deciding which parts of competitor websites are worth taking inspiration from. Collabim can track your website’s rankings for specific keywords on both Google and Seznam. It compares your website with the competition, allowing you to see how you’re performing in organic search results compared to your direct competitors. This will help you determine your next marketing strategy.
We couldn’t fit any more details into this text, but you can find them in our webinar ‘How to Analyse the Competition’, which you can watch for free.
Would you like advice on the analysis and help in determining the next steps based on it?
Get in touch and let’s get started!