12 Experts Share Their Strategy for Competitor Website Analysis

Hi, Readers, Hope you are having a beautiful day. I am here with another Roundup post competitor website Analysis on my newly launched tech blog.

First of all, I want to thank, Rohan Chaubay, Atish, Nirmala, Swadhin, Kulwant, Harsh, Nikhil, Naveen, Sasidhar, and Sherman Sir for participating in this Round-up Post.

Now, I am coming to the topic,

When it comes to competitors’ website analysis, many marketing experts recommend competitive analysis as part of their marketing strategy.

So, is there any advantage to looking at your competitor’s websites or does it just inspire you to be a follower? Personally, I think yes, there are many benefits to benchmarking your competitors online, but I have to admit that competitor analysis is often done for the wrong reasons and with the wrong desired outcomes.

In my view, there’s nothing better than determining your progress against your performance, plans or targets and using this information alongside some broad competitor knowledge.

Let’s now have a look at what experts have to say about their Strategy for competitor website analysis.

Competitor Website Analysis Strategy by 12 Blogging Experts

ROHAN CHAUBEY – Founder of ROHAN CHAUBEY.COM

1. Things to consider while doing an analysis of competitor’s website?

Answer: I consider no website as a “competition.” For me, competition does not exist, only collaboration.

Every website stands for something different than others. There are high possibilities that every site is unique and can differ from others with their niche, target audience, expertise, pricing, marketing or content.

Whenever analyzing a site, I always look for —

1. Social media stats.
2. Traffic.
3. Backlinks and domain authority.
4. Keywords and other search metrics.

2. Which tool do you recommend for competitor website analysis?

Answer: You can use the following tools and services to analyze and track sites –

1. Alexa.com – To track best keywords, traffic, and links.
2. Mentions App (www.mention.com – To track mentions.
3. Ahrefs.
4. Open Site Explorer

Kulwant Nagi – FOUNDER OF BLOGGING CAGE

1. Things to consider while doing an analysis of competitor website?

The very first thing I consider doing competitor analysis is, I search for some big keywords in Google. E.g., installing windows 10, how to remove the virus, etc., etc. These are competitive terms, so any site ranking for these terms is obviously is a big website. I shortlist a few good blogs and try digging deep to find more ideas.

2. Which tool do you recommend for competitor website analysis?

My favorite is SEMrush ( the reader can get FREE 14 days trial with this link). It is a very advanced tool to find the ranking keywords, top backlinks, anchor texts, and diversity of the backlinks.

Harsh Agarwal- FOUNDER OF ShoutMEloud

1. Things to Consider while doing an Analysis of Competitors Website:

Domain authority & current SEO status of the site. If a site search engine presence is increasing, that means it’s a good place to get some actionable steps. If the said site ranking is going down, simply move to another one. Saying that sometimes even old sulking down sites have hidden gems. You need to know where & what to look for such kinds of sites.

2. Which tool do you recommend for competitor website analysis: 

My favorite is SEMRUSH & occasionally I use Ahrefs.

Nirmala Santhakumar -FOUNDER OF MyMagicFundas

1. Things to Consider while doing an Analysis of Competitors Website

First, we should know who our competitors are! After finding them, we need to visit their blog/site to analyze their design, content quality, and URL structures.

As keywords play a vital role in SEO, it is good to have an in-depth look at the keywords used, their placement, and the density of our opponents. Now comes the key part of competitor analysis, i.e. inspecting their backlinks with any backlink checker tools.

If they performed White hat techniques for the long run, then it would be good to follow them to get better search engine rankings.

Evaluating their social presence would help us to do enhanced social media marketing that would increase our brand exposure.  It is good to overlook their DA and site age as well.

2. Which tool do you recommend for competitor website analysis?

I use the Long Tail Pro Platinum version for doing keyword research where I can perform the competitive analysis as well. I usually choose the long-tail keywords with a decent number of global searches.

LTP shows the top 10 ranking sites for every keyword and their DA, PA, Page links, Link page juice, Moz rank, and Site Age. Moreover, it calculates AVG KC (Average Competitiveness) for each keyword.

With all these data, I can come to the conclusion of whether I would be able to rank for a particular keyword or not and beat my competitors.

I hope that I’m clear, and it helps too!

Swadhin Agrawal – FOUNDER OF DigitalGYD.com

1. Things to Consider while doing an Analysis of Competitors Website

Competitor analysis is very vital if you want to stay in the game. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is good but knowing what powers your competitor and how you can grab the market share from them is what makes competitor analysis fun.

Here are a few things I consider while doing a competition analysis campaign.

1) First, find out who is your immediate competition. The ideal candidate for spying is always the one who is more popular and ranks higher than you do. There is no point going after the big fishes like socialmediaexaminer.com or Moz.com because if you are small, it’s not possible to outrank them directly. So look at someone who is doing better than you but not someone who is too big a player in your niche.

2) After you have your target, check almost all or any of these things as the campaign demands.

• Competitor’s site rankings and keyword domination in the SERPs.
• Then I find the top posts on that site and monitor gaps or holes in their marketing strategies. I see if their page or post has chances of improvement regarding the content or user experience. That is important because 70% of US users abandon a site with poor optimization.
• I also take a deep look into their backlinks strategy and see if there is a content way I can rob them (it’s ethical :P) of their links. If no, I apply my proven techniques to build quality backlinks and try to outrank them.

2. Which tool do you recommend for competitor website analysis?

I use SEMrush for backlink analysis and keyword research. You can also use Google Keyword Planner to find out the popular keywords of a page by entering the competitor URL in the landing page section.

You can also use a similar web or Alexa to find out basic information about the site plus its audience demographics. However, this method is only limited to the beginner level because they don’t provide advanced insights.

TIP: You can use mondovo to do whatever SEMrush does for free. It does not provide too advanced options, but newbies can easily find the best competitor keywords and backlink data here.

Nirav Dave – CTO & Co-Founder Capsicum Mediaworks

1. Things to consider while doing an analysis of competitor website? 

If you want your business to grow in the online market then doing a competitor analysis is a must. Identifying strategies that can help you boost your ranking is the primary aim of conducting a competitor analysis and as such, having valuable data like;

• What keywords your competitors are ranking for?
• Which of their content is getting the most engagement on social media?
• How are they performing in terms of Link building?

It will help you to determine the key areas of improvement on your site and will help you enhance your Content and Social strategy as well as Paid & Organic SEO campaigns. 

2. Which tool do you recommend for competitor website analysis?

• Open Site Explorer Tool – This tool helps you identify important metrics such as Page Authority, Domain Authority, Anchor text, and more. 
• Buzzsumo – This tool helps track Social Media Metrics such as shares, likes, retweets, etc of different social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+.
• Ahrefs – This tool is great for researching competitor backlinks and helps track Keywords that your competitors are ranking for

Pradeep Kumar – Founder/Editor of HellBound Bloggers (HBB)

1. Things to Consider while doing Analysis of Competitors Website

Make sure you pick the right competitor. If you are running a restaurant, then you don’t exactly need to see a Food delivery start-up as your competitor. So it’s wise to analyze your competitors first. Keep a list of the top 5 and analyze them properly.

2. Which tool do you recommend for competitor website analysis?

I use all the popular tools like Ahrefs, Majestic, Moz, etc., but to be honest, to analyze them properly, we need to get to know them personally. An online business model is good, but we have to see what they are exactly. Become their reader, become their customer, become their client, and see what’s going on. If you are “X”, then “Y” is your competitor and vice versa. To see what’s special about them.

Atish Ranjan – FOUNDER OF TechTricksWorld

1. Things to Consider while doing an Analysis of Competitors Website

I think while analyzing your competitor’s website; you must know:

• Their traffic stats
• Their backlink profile
• They’re targeted keywords
• Their marketing, promotion strategies, and Popularity.
• Content Marketing Strategy.

2. Which tool do you recommend for competitor website analysis?

• SE Ranking
• Ahrefs
• Open Site Explorer
• Monitor Backlinks
• Alexa

These are the tools, I would recommend. However, there are many tools that can help you with competitor website analysis.

Naveen Kumar- FOUNDER OF F5THEREFRESH

Hey Saurabh,

Thanks for inviting me for a discussion.

If you can understand, how your competitors are growing faster than you, you achieve half of the goal of your business, and now you just need to make a better action plan to deliver better than your competitor and push him back.

The same happens in Internet Marketing. First of all, you just need to find out who your competitor is and why they are ranking in front of you?  So now the question is how to find your competitor?

It’s quite simple. Just check to pick your major or primary keyword and search on Google. Check out who Is ranking in the Top 5 places. Keep in mind that all the results can be or can’t be your competitor so Now pick your sub as another primary keyword and search on Google. Now check how many are repeating.

The repeating results are your main competitors.  There is also some tool to find out your competitor like sem rush; you can get an idea from there.

1. Things to consider while doing Analysis of Competitors Website

• Domain Authority
• Page Authority
• Trust Flow
• Citation Flow
• Backlinks- Find out the websites that are linking to your competitor’s website.
• Keywords – How they are using keywords and what keywords they are targeting.
• Keyword Ranking – Check out how many keywords are ranking on the 1st and 2nd page.
• Social Media Presence.
• Check out how they are marketing – Paid Marketing or Traditional Marketing

2. Which tool do you recommend for competitor website analysis?

For checking Search engine performance

• SEMRush
• Ahrefs

For checking link popularity

• Open Site Explorer
• Majestic SEO

For Analyzing Traffic and Visitors

• SimilarWeb.com
• Alexa.com

Sherman Smith – FOUNDER OF Sherman Smith Blog

Things to Consider while doing Analysis of Competitors Website

Here is my answer:

I don’t look at other websites like my competitors. As a matter of fact, I believe that’s the first mistake that most entrepreneurs make when analyzing other’s websites.

I made this mistake about three years ago. I remember looking at the Alexa rankings of a couple of bloggers whose content was pretty generic, although it helped to steer their audience in the right direction. Well, I find out that the Alexa ranking isn’t always a trustworthy indicator that the writer is financially successful with their business.

A year later after Google made a few updates to their algorithm the sites I referred to with the great Alexa ranking ended up with a horrible Alexa. I saw it was mainly through keyword stuffing, and also, the information they had was very basic, generic, and at many times unrelated.

As far as a great website is concerned, there are 5 basic things I look for

• The message (or brand) they’re trying to promote with consistency
• How relevant each topic and keywords within each article correlates with the message
• Social Proof as far as comments and interaction
• Number of shares
• How many times they publish a blog post per month

2. Which tool do you recommend for competitor website analysis?

As far as tools are concerned, I only use certain tools to come up with great topics and keywords. Here’s 3 that I use sometimes

Buzzsumo  (http://buzzsumo.com)

Ahrefs  (https://ahrefs.com)

Moz’s Open Site Explorer (https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/)

Google Suggestions

So as far as the mistake, my resolution was making an effort to look at other bloggers and website owners as a potential to collaborate with instead of people to compete with. This change of mindset, helped me to attract more great opportunities and better results.

Nikhil Saini – FOUNDER OF MyQuickidea

Competitor analysis is very important for marketers to outrank the competition. We do a competitive analysis for a specific keyword. Below is my way to analyze the competition:

Things to Consider while doing Analysis of Competitors Website

• Install the Moz Toolbar; it shows some link metrics in the Google Search Results.
• Put your keyword in the Google search engine.
• Now compare the link metrics of the top ten results. Analyze the Page Authority, Domain Authority, and the links count, etc.
• If you find even a single link ranking with low link metrics than your blog, you can consider the keyword for working.
• In the search engine, put your keyword in the double quotations mark (“) to check the title competition. For instance, “Make money online”. If the results figure is under 1000, it’s good for you.
• Now look for the backlinks of your selected competitor. You can use the open site explorer for it. If links are coming from high authority sites, then you would also have to build links from high authority sources.
• Look for the domain age.
• Use MajesticSeo for anchor text optimization.
• Look into the length of the content. If it’s a high-quality article, then you should consider creating a more in-depth article having great insights into the topic.

These are a few steps that I follow each time for writing a blog post. I consider all things like content length, PA, DA, Backlinks,  Anchor Text Optimization, Title Competition, etc.

2. Which tool do you recommend for competitor website analysis?

• Moz Toolbar
• Keyword revealer
• Ahrefs
• Majestic

Sasidhar Kareti – FOUNDER OF Amfas tech

1. Things to Consider while doing Analysis of Competitors Website

The competitor analysis should not kill our productive space by spending more time on them. Search engine performance, social media performance & user engagement, heatmaps areas on the website that your website is missing and with what they are gaining and the presentation of the content is what you should look for broadly instead of just keywords and links. The time you spend must be educational and research-oriented regarding your business.

2. Which tool do you recommend for competitor website analysis?

Simple and popular tools like Moz and Ahrefs are sufficient to grab a picture of your losing market with competitors. Technically, you may use Google Page Speed Analytics and GTMetrix to analyze what’s throwing off your visitors and to reduce the market for your website.