Competitor Analysis – Why You Should Be Doing It For Your Business

Competitor analysis is not about spying, underhand tactics or being ruthless, it is simply about looking at your main competitors, working out what they do well and not so well and making sure you follow the same things that they are doing well and avoid doing things that are not being done quite so well.

Quite often, by looking at what your competitors are doing, you can quite often spot areas that they might not have exploited or areas of weaknesses that your company and / or website can take advantage of.

Most SEO consultancies offer a full competitor analysis report, once they have sat down with you and worked out for which products, services or keywords you are looking to perform for, they can then compile reports to suggest who your main competitors are, what they do well, how they are performing and then make suggestions based on this information to help you improve your website.

A good SEO company will look at many areas when undertaking this type of research and these include:

● In-depth look at the website

● Content

● Keywords

● Strengths of website

● Weaknesses of website

● Link building campaigns

● SERPs – how well they do in the search engines

They should also offer a lot more than is listed above, and can also work with you to make sure the type of research and analysis is related to exactly what you are seeking to know.

You can also complete most of this competitor analysis yourself, but you do have to remember it can be quite time consuming and you sometimes would benefit from specialist tools of the trade, that most SEO companies will be using when undertaking any kind of research.

Once you have this information, you can then identify suggestions as how to be more competitive and spot the areas that you feel you should be concentrating on and areas that you are maybe not making the most of. Any company, website or business can always learn from their competitors, as there are always so many things that you can improve on when it comes to running a successful business.

Written By Ian Spencer - SEO Gloucestershire