No business is an island, and finding success in the e-commerce world is much easier if you know who’s competing for those same dollars. That’s why it’s important to monitor your competitors online, so you can know what’s working for them, how it impacts your SEO, and how to keep pace.
One of the best ways to figure out what your competitors are up to is to use SEO tools to map their strategies and track what’s working for them. These tools can then help you develop data-based strategies that will take what works for the competition and adapt it to your business model.
There are few areas of SEO more important than backlinks as this spreads awareness of your company consistently while bumping search engine rankings. Are your backlinks keeping pace with your competitors’? Here’s how to find out and get all the information you need from your competitors.
Leveraging Backlinking Tools
How do you find out which sites your competition is using to promote their product? One of the easiest ways is with backlinking tools and platforms that can identify your competitors and where their backlinks are.
Site Explorer is one of five tools that comes with the Ahrefs subscription, aimed to make it easy to break down the traffic of any website you’ve marked as a competition. It’ll analyze organic traffic through search engines and paid traffic like ads and other marketing tools. But its most valuable tool is the backlink checker, which finds the sites that link to your competitor and provides an analysis of their quality.
The best way to use this data is to see what’s working and what isn’t for your competitor. You don’t want to copy their strategy – especially if they’re commonly using lower-quality sites. But once you see which of their links and placements provide the most results, it makes sense to find a parallel approach to compete effectively.
Comparing Content Performance
Your main goal with analyzing your competition should be increasing your organic traffic. Paid traffic has benefits for improving awareness, especially in the early going as you try to establish your brand. But few people ever refer an ad to someone else, and eventually, the returns will diminish. Organic traffic pays for itself and delivers lasting results.
If you’re in a crowded field, the odds are good that your competitors have found many of the best places to backlink already – and they probably won’t give up those secrets on their own. Tools like the Ahrefs Suite let you legally explore sites and get information that may not be accessible to the everyday browser.
These tools can also help you find the keywords that your competitors use to rank on search engines. Picking the right keyword is an important choice because you might get lost in the shuffle if you pick a common one. The most effective tactic is often to pick a frequently searched spinoff of the most popular keyword, giving you a more narrow but focused search niche.
Competitor Analysis for PPC
PPC or Pay Per Click is a niche of marketing where you’re putting up an ad, and you pay a small fee for every time it’s clicked. This is often popular with new companies because you only pay more as you get more successful. But it’s crucial to analyze your competition to get the most out of this service because if you’re getting clicks but not translating them to sales, your money vanishes.
The state of the e-commerce world changes fast, and PPC competitor analysis helps you avoid some common pitfalls. These software tools can provide you with information on how many clicks your competitor is getting and how many times that translates into actual purchase. If a keyword is a disaster, you know what to avoid.
It’s also a useful tool for breaking down SEO. SERPs, or search engine result pages, differ based on the parent company. While Google is the main one you should be concerned with, you want to rank high on as many as possible and seeing how your competitors perform with paid ads can help you get the most out of your advertising investment.
Know Your Competition
It’s rare to have a market niche to yourself. To make your business stand out, you’ll need to learn what the competition is doing and do it one step better. The first step is to arm yourself with the best analysis tools out there.