The online marketplace is heavy on competition. To have success, you need to do more than just offer good products or services – you need to find ways to set your business apart from the competition. One way to stay ahead of the curve is ensuring you have competitor insights.

As important as it is to build a unique brand identity, you should still recognize that there is a lot you can learn from your competition. The websites of your competitors can offer a wealth of information that could help your business succeed. 

With the right competitor analysis tools, you can learn so much about their traffic, the products they sell and different strategies they employ. In this post, we are going to cover some of the things you can learn by analyzing the websites of your competitors.

Maximum Potential for a New Campaign 

With similar products or services, you are likely to have the need to run campaigns that have similar objectives to those of your competitors. Whether you are launching a new product or starting a new promotion, you can use the experience and insights of your competitors to your advantage.

Find the pages and content that would align with a similar campaign by your competitor. With the right tools, you can analyze the traffic to see how well they performed. You might also be able to glean insights like the marketing channels or ad strategies that offered the best results. 

The Number of Customers They Have

It can always help to know what you are up against. With competitive analysis, you can get an idea of how many customers your competitors have. Some of these tools will let you sort results by URLs that have words like “pay”, “cart” or “basket”. You can then look at these pages and see how many unique visitors they have.  Beyond that, you could apply the same strategy to individual products. This could give you some insight into how well your offers are doing by comparison.

Top Products or Services

Just like any other business, your competition is going to have strengths and weaknesses. Being able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your competition can offer real value to your online business. 

Look for the pages that perform the best and determine which products or services they support. Once you know their top products, you can start looking at things like the top traffic sources to those pages. If you have similar products, you can then start to develop a plan to work with those same traffic sources to promote your products.

As an alternative, you could also look for the products or services where your competition is weak. You could then try to focus on those products or services from your brand to capitalize on a space where you can perform well without as much competition.

Their Strongest Content

Developing a successful content marketing strategy is crucial for success with online marketing. While you are going to need to do your own keyword research and build a content marketing strategy that is unique to your brand, you can still learn from and adapt some of the content your competitors use.

Whether it is blogs, social media posts or anything else, the most successful content of your competitors should be of interest to you. If you see a blog that got a lot of traffic or a social media post that had a lot of engagement, you should try to see how you can do something similar to help your business. Beyond that, you might see ideas you thought were good but did not perform well for your competition. This might be a sign that the same content is not worth the time or effort.

Hidden Content

There are a lot of pages you might not see in the search results or the navigation of the website. As an example, they might have landing pages that were designed for different PPC campaigns. With the right tools, you can find these pages and learn from them. 

As an example, you might find a lot of these landing pages listed as the top pages on the website. You wouldn’t want to copy them directly, but you could use some of the same tactics when you develop your own PPC campaigns. Along with that, you could also look at the traffic sources. If the landing pages are getting a lot of traffic from just one or two sources, you have to consider whether it is something you can integrate into your marketing strategy.