Any digital marketing strategy is incomplete without an effective competitor analysis. Many digital marketers do competitor analysis before getting into the ebbs and flows of digital marketing.

1. How To Do Competitor Analysis In Digital Marketing?
Any digital marketing strategy is incomplete without an effective competitor analysis. Many digital
marketers do competitor analysis before getting into the ebbs and flows of digital marketing.
Competitor analysis in digital marketing is all about analyzing the performance of your competitors
in the market. We can call the competitor analysis in digital marketing as digital competitor research.
Competitors are the companies and businesses that share an audience, market, product, etc.
Competitor's analysis is all about evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of competitors, finding
the gaps, and filling them to get the benefit. We will talk about how to do competitor analysis in
digital marketing without missing out on a single opportunity.
So let's get into it.
Reasons To Do Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis is necessary to keep an eye on your competi+++tion and changing dynamics
regarding market positioning. The most convincing reasons why do you need to perform competitor
analysis include:
Understanding your target audience
Your business and your competitors are targeting the same market segment. You are performing a
competitor analysis to see the audience expectations vs. engagement your competitor is driving. As
a result, you can understand more about the traits of your target audience, which leads to more
accurate forecasting of audience behavior.

2. Understanding your competitors
It's the preliminary focus of the competitor analysis: know your competition. You are evaluating your
competitor's market position, product offerings, customer service, online presence, marketing,
engagement, etc. As a result, you know very well about your competitors and market as well.
Identify gaps
When analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, you identify the gaps your
competitors have been missing out. Every gap is an opportunity for your business.
To improve your digital marketing strategy
You can expand your digital marketing and SEO strategy through competitor analysis. The data
collected from the analysis enables the businesses to have a better content planning strategy and
keyword research. It also gives a better understanding of what the audience is demanding.
Competitor analysis is also an opportunity for businesses to refine their goals and revise their
marketing strategies to fit the new market dynamics and trends.
Update Yourself On Market Dynamics and Trends
By performing competitor analysis, businesses can stay updated on the changing market dynamics,
from demand/supply to new players entering the market.
Market Standards And Pitfalls
The strengths and successes of your competitors work as the new best practices to follow. In other
words, you're learning and expanding from your competitor's experience. The weaknesses of your
competitors translate into the pitfalls you should be avoiding to ditch the failure.
Questions To Get Started
Before you actually get into performing the competitor analysis in digital marketing, you must
answer the following questions:
Who?
Identify who your competitors are.
Generally, there are three types of competitors:
Direct Competitors are the businesses and companies that offer the same product or service to the
same customer base as your business. Or it can be said that the direct competitors are very similar
to your business in product, service, audience, customers, distribution channels, and business goals.
Indirect Competitors might have the same product as you're offering, but their business goals or end
goals are not the same as yours.
Substitute Competitors are businesses offering products or services that are direct substitutes for
your product offering. They are targeting your customers and have the same business goals.
What?
The second question to ask before getting into competitor analysis in digital marketing is what
metrics to analyze?
Most commonly, you should be analyzing the following metrics:
 Marketing campaigns of your competitors
 Organic and paid traffic

3.  Social Media Marketing Metrics
 Audience engagement
 Competitor backlinks analysis
 Competitor keyword research
 Market position and share
How Often?
It's an important question to ask before you do the competitor analysis for the first time.
How often should you perform the competitor analysis and track the metrics?
A lot of marketers enthusiastically do the competitor analysis and never get back to it. But in reality,
a regular revision of your competitor analysis according to the changing market dynamics is an
important part of successful competitor analysis.
How To Do Competitor Analysis In Digital Marketing?
Here is how to do digital competitor research to improve your digital marketing strategy. in
Analyze Market Position Of Top Competitors
Once you have identified the top 5 competitors in the industry, start with analyzing the market
position of your competitors and your own business as compared to them. You will need to stay
updated on the overall market positioning, share, and performance of each competitor.
Doing it manually might not be worth it. Semrush offers a Semrush Market Explorer that can help
you easily evaluate your competitors' performance and performance. You can get important insights
about your competitors that include:
 An overall competitive landscape that shows every competitor from the perspective of the
growth quadrant of the BCG matrix
 Current audience sizes and market potential of each competitor can be evaluated
 Create custom markets by hand-picking your rivals by evaluating their audience
engagement, traffic sources, etc.
You can always come back to check the new traffic sources, keywords, seasonal trends, new players,
etc.
Audience Engagement Across Different Channels
You're sharing the target customer segments and audiences with your competitors. Therefore, it's
important to know how they are engaging the audience across different channels. You can analyze
the traffic and engagement by channel using the Semrush Traffic Analytic tool. You can check the
data of your top competitors for
 Which market channels are they capitalizing on
 Audience interests in different social media
 You can also get insights about the most qualified audience having a high chance of
conversion
SEO Strategy Of Competitors
SEO is the key to getting organic reach and more conversions. Seo strategy of your competitors is of
high importance in your digital competitor research. You must monitor your competitors for organic
search visibility and paid research visibility.

4. You can understand consumer behavior, audience interest, successful & ranking keywords, as well as
the content type of your competitors by doing the analysis. The useful metrics that can help you
refine your own keyword research and content planning to have more organic search visibility
include:
 Keywords used by competitors and ranked in Google's top 100
 Monthly traffic against the ranking keywords
 Price for paid search visibility against each keyword
 Branded and non-branded traffic against the keywords your competitors are using.
 Keyword gaps give you an opportunity to revise your content marketing strategy and target
these keywords.
Your SEO strategy analysis must also cater to the off-page SEO metrics of the competitors, including
competitor backlink analysis. You can use different online tools that provide a detailed backlink
analysis of any website.
Marketing Campaigns
Finally, evaluating your competitors' marketing and advertising campaigns also enables you to plan
your marketing strategy accordingly. Check out the most successful and powerful campaigns run by
your competitors. Analyze the ad copies, conversion rates, engagement, traffic sources, etc. By
analyzing the market campaigns, you can focus on providing the counter-offers to the customers
that are more appealing and converting than the competitors.
Wrap Up
It’s important to hit the right strings to get the desirable results from your digital marketing strategy.
We hope that you will be able to perform the digital competitor research and capitalize on the
information provided in this blog.