One of the most important aspects of starting a new business is analyzing the competition. You’re not analyzing the competition so that you can borrow all of their ideas. Rather, you want to analyze the competition to see what they may have missed. You’re looking for golden opportunities that you can capitalize on.
You’ll have to put some careful thought into your own business’s online strategy. But what do you base that strategy upon?
Partly, it should be based on what your competition is doing.
One area of analysis that is important to focus on is content. What kind of content does your competitor produce? What content gets the most traffic? What is the top ranked content in the search engines for the keywords you want to target?
Secondly, you want to analyze your competition’s inbound links. Where are they coming from? Furthermore, what anchor text are they using? Which pages are being linked to more often? Are the links being generated by your competition’s SEO team or are they natural links as a result of people liking the page?
Finally, you want to spend some time analyzing your competition’s social media marketing strategy. Do they have a presence on social media sites? Which ones? Are their accounts active or abandoned? How much do they post on those sites and what kind of content? Can you determine their level of engagement or reach?
Spying on the competition is not hard, but it is necessary. Spend some time on competitive analysis before you complete your online marketing strategy.