Conducting a high-level competitive analysis is crucial to your online success. Often, your most significant opportunities come from your competitors’ data.

Keeping up with your competitors’ marketing strategies is a great way to identify their strengths and weaknesses.  Which you can use for your marketing strategy.

The first step into developing a competitive analysis strategy is determining who your competitors are.  Once you’ve established who they are, you can dig into their strategies and walk away with actionable data.

Below are 3 ways to monitor your competitor’s marketing strategies.

1. Identifying your competitors

The first thing you want to do in your competitive analysis strategy is to identify your competitors.  Now, you may already have one competitor in mind, but there’s a possibility that you have other competitors that compete with you on Google that you’re not aware of.

2. Visit their website and set up alerts

This is basic but still insightful.  Head over to Google and search your competitors’ domain. Pay attention to their titles and meta descriptions. What tone do they use? Do they have a CTA in their meta description? Viewing a competitor’s website is also a great way to get information on new features they’ve released, positioning or other strategies you were not aware of.

You can also use tools like BuiltWith to see what technology your competitors’ are using.  This helps you understand what they are trying to accomplish and what’s important to them.

3. Assess their SEO Performance

If your competitor has a solid SEO footprint, there’s a lot to learn from tracking where they are and how they reached that point. Analyzing your competitor’s SEO will help you understand how they draw people to their site through informative, relevant content.

You can emulate their approach by targeting many of the same keywords that they target. You should also fill in the gaps by covering territory where they’re weak or have no presence. Identifying those areas will be a key part of your competitor analysis. Here’s what to look for:

1. Their most valuable organic content: see what gets them the most clicks.
2. Their existing rankings: what areas do they have a strong presence.
3. Their past rankings: watch for growth and important changes.
4. Their backlink profile: pages that link to them and help them rank.