Digital Marketing - Conducting Competitive Analysis

A few years ago, the task of optimising a website for the search engines could be easily completed without giving a thought as to what digital marketing strategy was being followed by competitors. As the competition was limited, most companies were likely to succeed, no matter which keywords they targeted. However, those days are long gone. Today, it is vital to include competitive analysis with all SEO efforts, to set priorities and discover new opportunities for further optimisation.

Firstly, you should identify the benefits that a competitive analysis will bring you. Do you want the company to approve a bigger digital marketing budget, so that you can match the level of SEO activities being carried out by your competitors? Are you looking to create and employ a project plan based on a list of new digital marketing tactics? Most digital marketing professionals usually analyse why the competitors are doing better than the client website, before finding acceptable industry tactics that can be used on the client's website to improve rankings.

Secondly, competitive analysis should be conducted only for client websites that have been live for a certain period of time. In a majority of cases, digital marketing professionals perform competitive analysis before building a site. This is because they want to know what the competitors are doing, so that they can create a better SEO strategy. On the other hand, competitive analysis conducted on live websites, will give you a good comparison of its actual performance vis-à-vis competitors, and information about the gap that needs to be closed.

Thirdly, the core of competitive analysis lies in the list of digital marketing keywords, selected for optimising a website. Traffic from search results pages is not in itself a measure of success, but rather a prerequisite for success. As this traffic is connected to the keywords typed by searchers, it is very important that digital marketing professionals select the right keywords, based on thorough competitive analysis. In cases, where a client has multiple categories of products, one should segment keywords into baskets of related terms, and then locate competitors for each basket of terms.

Remember, a client's biggest offline competitors may not be much of a competition online. A client's main SEO competitors are those that rank better for selected digital marketing keywords, whether they have an offline location or not.

Qudos Digital is a leading digital marketing agency and can be contacted on 020 8891 2077 or info@qudosdigital.co.uk.

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