Keeping an eye on your competitors’ strategies and tactics is a great way to stay ahead of the competition. Whether you’re a small business owner or a large enterprise, monitoring your competitors’ websites and advertising campaigns can be an invaluable tool when it comes to improving your marketing efforts.
With the right tools and techniques, you can easily spy on your competitor’s websites and ad copies to gain valuable insights that will help you build a better, more effective marketing strategy. In this article, we’ll walk through the process of how to spy on your competitors’ websites and ad copies so that you can gain the upper hand in the marketing game.
What is Competitive Analysis?
Competitive analysis is a marketing research technique that involves looking at the competition and analyzing its strengths, weaknesses, and strategies to understand better how you can improve your marketing efforts.
Why Spying on Your Competitor is Necessary?
The information you collect during the competitive analysis will help create a more detailed marketing strategy. For example, suppose you’re in the retail sector and want to understand your competitors’ marketing strategies better. In that case, you can use competitive analysis to identify the products and services your competitors are promoting and how they advertise them. With this information, you can create a marketing strategy that promotes your products and services in a way that resonates with your audience.
Competitive analysis will also help you discover ways to make your marketing campaigns more effective. For example, if you look at your competitors’ sales ads and realize they are using certain words or phrases that are getting a lot of attention, you can incorporate those same terms in your ad copy to boost your SEO.
How to Spy on Your Competitors
a. Identify Your Competitors
The first step in the process is to identify the websites you want to spy on. If you’re doing competitive analysis for a particular product or service, you should spy on all the websites selling similar items. If you want to look at more general marketing strategies, you can spy on sites in your industry and your competitors.
b. Review your competitor’s websites
Once you’ve identified your competitors, you can start to analyze their websites to get a better idea of how you can improve your marketing efforts. Visit their websites and review the content they have published.
Note the type of information and products they are offering and the language they’re using to describe their products and services. You can also look at the design of their websites and see if there are any elements or visuals you can incorporate into your site.
c. Analyze Your Competitor’s Ads
Once you’ve gone through your competitors’ websites and taken note of their strategies and tactics, it’s time to analyze their ads. Analyzing your competitors’ ads will give you an even better idea of how and why they’re marketing their products as they are, and you can use that information to make your ads more effective.
With the right tools, you can easily spy on your competitor’s ads and see where they’re being shown and what they’re being shown as. Please take a look at the ads your competitors are currently running and see what they’re promoting. Please note the products or services they’re marketing and the claims they’re making.
You can also keep an eye on where the ads are being shown and how often they’re being shown. That will give you an idea of where your competitors are focusing their marketing efforts and what types of audiences they’re targeting.
Essential tips to remember
When you’re spying on your competitor’s websites, you want to ensure you’re not being too aggressive or prominent. You don’t want to leave a noticeable digital trail, and you certainly don’t want to get caught. The following tips shall help you achieve this,
Avoid “Cut and Paste” – Before you start writing your next ad copy or sales page, try to write it as if you’re your consumer. Take the content from your competitor’s ad and rewrite it as if you’re the consumer who is being targeted by the ad. If it resonates with you, it will resonate with your consumer, too.
Ask “What If” – You can also try asking yourself, “what if” your competitor’s ads were directed at you? If you were the consumer targeted by an ad, what would you want to know about the product or service? What would you want to see in the ad? That will also help you get inside your consumer’s minds and what they want and need to see in an ad.
Spy on Your Competitor’s Website – You can also monitor your competitor’s website traffic and see what they’re promoting. Remember, this doesn’t have to be limited to your direct competitors. You can also monitor what your competitors who are in the same industry are doing.
That can give you an idea of what marketing strategies are currently working in your industry and what type of content is resonating with consumers. This information can inspire your marketing efforts and develop more effective strategies.
The best tool for spying on your competitors
The Rankwatch website analyzer is the best tool for performing a detailed competitor analysis. Following is the step-by-step guide for how to use this fantastic tool for spying on your competitors,
Method-1: Using Domain Research
· First, log in to your Rankwatch account and add a project.
· Click on the ‘Domain Research’ icon (marked in yellow) in the left-hand side menu, as shown below.
• Enter your competitor’s domain name (partsgeek.com in the following case), and click explore as shown below.
• The results will load in seconds. If you click on the ‘Competitor Analysis’ icon (marked in yellow), it will show the list of all your competitors along with their key metrics like Common keywords, Common keywords search volume, share of voice, etc., as shown below.
• The adjacent graph shows the position of your analyzed domains with respect to competitors.
Now, if you wish to find competitors for your targeted keywords, you need to follow the following method.
Method 2: Using the Competitor Analysis Tool
• Go back to the Rankwatch competitor analysis dashboard and click on the ‘Competitors’ icon (marked in yellow) in the left-hand side menu, as shown below.
• The AI ‘Lara’ keeps pointing out your new competitors, ads, organic, and various SERP feature competitors, as shown below.
• If you scroll down, you will get the entire list of your competitors, along with all ranking keywords and URLs, as shown below. Rankwatch allows you to analyze an unlimited number of competitors.
• Suppose you want to perform a micro-level analysis to find your true competitors. In that case, you need to segment your targeted keywords and group them based on the categories of your business. That can be achieved by allocating tags to each of your targeted keywords.
• Once that is done, Rankwatch will analyze the top hundred pages ranking for each keyword within your segment and review your actual competitors in your business category.
• For example, Partsgeek is an online store for different auto parts that have been operating since 2008. They have competitors like advanceautoparts, eBay, carparts, etc., shown above. Now, if you perform a Google search for BMW parts, it will show a list of entirely different competitors, excluding the competitors shown above. That shows Partsgeek is not a competitor for this specific keyword and search.
• Now let’s go back to the Rankwatch dashboard and allocate the keyword BMW parts.
• Click on the ‘Rankings’ (marked in yellow) and scroll down to the table below. Search for BMW parts and allocate the tag BMW parts to all targeted keywords, as shown below.
• If you go back to the competitor analysis dashboard, you will see the overall competitors ranking for your targeted keywords, as shown below.
• Now, if you wish to analyze your true competitors, specifically for BMW parts, select the BMW tag and apply as shown below.
• The tool will now show specific competitors for this category after analyzing each targeted keyword, as shown below. These data are essential to plan your marketing strategy.
• Now, if you want to compare your competitors, you need to select them and click on ‘Competitor Comparison’ (marked in yellow), as shown below.
• It will show country-wise search volume and the ranking of different competitors for each keyword, as shown below.
· By clicking ‘Table Settings,’ you can add more metrics as per your requirement and then apply the same as shown below.
• Once you have identified your competitors, go back to the dashboard and click on ‘Rankings’ as shown below.
• Scroll down to the below table where you will find the SEO IQ factor for each of your competitors. That will help you to enhance your on-page SEO.
• If you further explore the SEO IQ factor of your site will find your top competitors along with other details of your page like exact keywords, broad keywords, page elements, speed and page size, etc., as shown below.
• The tool’s recommendations will help you create a superior landing page compared to your competitors.
• If you click ‘Content Recommendations’ (marked in yellow) at the top of the page, you will find a list of semantically related words and phrases for your targeted keywords. Using them will definitely help you to enhance your on-page SEO.
• You can further use all this information to create a successful marketing campaign for your website.
Conclusion
Spying on your competitors is a great way to improve your marketing efforts. With the information you collect from spying on your competitors, you can create more effective ads and better understand how your audience engages with your products and services. However, it is essential to use a reliable tool to make this tedious process a cakewalk.
