A competitor audit is designed to help you track where your competitors are and what is making them more visible online. Overall, the main goal of a competitor audit is to discover what is working for other people in your industry or your client’s industry, and then you can use similar techniques to gain a competitive advantage. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits and areas you should include within your competitor audit.
The Benefits
Learn About New Marketing Strategies
When carrying out a competitor audit you can learn about new marketing strategies and channels. Sometimes you get so caught up in your methods and channels that you forget there are other channels available for you. You may find that the strategies your competitors are using are not the right ones for your business, but it is good to investigate the different possibilities.
Develop a Better USP (Unique Selling Point)
No matter what you or your clients business does, the most important thing is to make sure you have unique selling points. Pretty much everything is done online, so it is important to make sure you are looking the best within your industry so customers go to you instead of your competitors. Having a good USP can also improve your branding and build trust.
Improve Your Overall SEO
By simply carrying out a competitor audit you could improve your overall SEO. For example, you might find out that your competitors are ranking for better keywords than you, therefore they are going to have a better chance of ranking than you are. Another advantage of doing an audit is that you will be able to see what backlinks your competitors have, backlinks can have a massive impact on your Domain Authority so it is definitely something you need to look into.
What to Include in Your Competitor Audit
Where to Find Your Competitors
You can use tools to find out who your competitors are but you can also do it manually. To do this, you just need to search for your main keyword that describes your business, if you want local competitors then you can add your location at the end. For example, if we were to search for “eCommerce marketing agency” then we would see a wide range of agencies across the country, but if we wanted more specific results, we would search “eCommerce marketing agency Lincoln” and it would show our local competitors.
Keywords
When you are wanting to optimise your website it is important to make sure you carry out keyword research so your pages rank. As well as doing your own keyword research you should also look at what your competitors are ranking for, this way you can see if there are any keywords you could also use in order to rank above them.
Backlinks
To look at your competitor’s backlinks you will need to use tools, within eComOne we use SEM Rush and Ahrefs to check what backlinks our competitors have. Backlinks are a great way to increase your Domain Authority and awareness of your brand. If you are going to try and gain backlinks from your competitor audit, you need to make sure they have a high Domain Authority and take a look round the website to make sure it is a quality site.
Quality of Content
Quality content is important because it is there to answer your audience’s questions, it allows you to build trust, improve conversion and generate leads. As well as having quality content, it also needs to be consistent, for example, if you have a blog on your website then you need to make sure you keep it up to date and post regularly. When carrying out your competitor audit you should also analyse the quality of your competitors content to see if there are any gaps where you could improve your content.
There are so many things you can add to your competitor audit, it all depends on what you want to know about your competitors to benefit your or your client’s business. As well as competitor audits, we also offer website audits for our clients, you can find out more here.
