Top tips for researching your competitors

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ECA Commercial Associate EnergyBillKill have provided five top tips to help research business competitors. The  original, full version of this post can be found at https://machfast.com/top-10-tips-and-tricks-for-researching-your-competitors/ 

ECA is an ideal forum in which to get to know competitors and the markets they operate in, in a friendly compliant way which will help nurture and grow your business with access to ECA Commercial Associates. You must do so in a way which does not represent ‘collusion’, which is the anti-competitive practice of fixing prices or commercial terms. This could open you up to liability for breach of competition law.

A competitor is a rival business, which is roughly the same size as yours and makes similar products to you. Your competitor will challenge your business for the same target market due to the similarities between your companies. Therefore it is in your best interest to take any advantage you can get to keep your business afloat and allow it to grow.

Researching competitors is crucial, but it is the use of these researching techniques that allows your business to blossom. While using the techniques below, be sure to ask yourself questions that can help your business, rather than purely understanding the competition. Such questions may be:

• Has my competitor overlooked a particular segment of the market?
• Does my competitor lack a producible service that clients in my market want?
• What campaigns has my client run that I myself can use to great effect in my business?

Fundamentally, the goal of researching competitors is to get the upper hand in a competitive environment.

Your first point of call should be a simple Google search

This will expose you to your competitor’s main website. From here you can get an understanding of their ideas and their angle on the market you both share. What you see on the screen says a lot about the business as a whole.

A more thorough look at their website often allows you to identify sections of their search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. Checking for keywords, meta descriptions and high level topics can be a great way of highlighting which areas they have focused on to bring clients to their website. Similarly ask yourself, “are there any important keywords they have missed and I can take advantage  of?”

Get to know your competitors

If it is a physical store, researching your competitors can be as easy as visiting their premises. This can be a great insight into how they work, how they treat their clients and how effectively they sell their products. You will be getting a firsthand experience of all these things which you can then use to further your own business.

For an extra tip: often you and your competitor will share the same suppliers – it is helpful to get to know them. Although asking crude questions such as “what did my competitors order and in what volume?” won’t be helpful, it can certainly be advantageous to ask questions such as “How many units of a certain product have been pre-ordered for next month?” 

Ask for your customers or clients’ views

Be sure not to skip more obvious ways of researching such as asking for the views of your customers. When you gain a customer, ask them what brought them to you and when you lose one, similarly ask what made them leave. After enough of these questions, you should get a very clear idea of what customers view as preferable and the competitive landscape as a whole.

Backlink research tools

Another easy way of researching your competitors is using backlink searching tools. Backlink tools show you which links, from other pages, connect back to your competitor’s page. Like looking through their website, using backlink tools will give you a greater insight into their SEO strategy. 

This is because you will be identifying their backlink profile which helps their site rank. Ask yourself questions like, do I have enough backlinks to my own site? Do my competitors have backlinks from quality sites that are helping them earn their high position? This all helps you climb the rankings so that your web page pops up first on Google.

Even without establishing your competitor’s backlink profile, using backlink tools is helpful in finding out what other websites have said about them. Like asking for your customers’ views, this helps you establish what your target market wants from your products (or similar products in the case of your competitor).

Google services such as Google Trends and Google Alerts

These two tools are excellent for competitor analysis. Google Trends allows you to compare the popularity of a specific term, phrase or person over a specified (specified by you) time frame. This allows you to see who the top players in your market are. Furthermore, Google Trends allows you to compare the popularity of your brand with your competitors’ brand. 

It displays the result in a single graph giving you the opportunity to see the effectiveness of your online brand image. If you are too small to appear on Google Trends, searching up key words gives you an idea of the main brands within your market.

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