What is a Competitive Analysis?

A competitive analysis looks at the marketing effectiveness of a company's online presence and their competition's. It takes a look at each site and determines what can be done to increase your market share. A Competitive Analysis is conducted at the beginning of every project to establish a basis for the success of the project.

There are three questions that must be answered before a competitive analysis can be started.

What makes a company a competitor?
There needs to be established criteria for who is a competitor and who is

not. Factors that go into defining a competitor include: size, location, price, market share, and other variables dependant on your industry.

Who are the competitors?
To have a successful competitive analysis, we must find the actual competition, not just the perceived competition. A search is conducted to find the three companies that best meet the criteria to be a competitor.

Who are the customers?
Knowing who the customers are, enables you to see how well targeted their online marketing is. A website whose customers are middle-aged men and a website whose customers are teenage girls should look and function differently. This question can be answered two ways; by defining who the current customers are or by defining who the desired customers are. This is almost always defined by the client.

Things to look at:

Site Architecture
Site Map
Look at their site map, if they have one, to see how they anticipate a user moving through their site. Is information easy to find? Is the setup intuitive? Does it make sense?

I was at a competitor's website recently and the only place you can find their Pricing page was through the Contact page. I would think that you would put the Pricing page in the Services or Portfolio section of the website. Their thinking must have been that if they are curious about our pricing structure they will contact us; hence it is in the Contact section. If I asked you find their Pricing page, is that the first place you would look?

Features

What features do your competitor's offer? Why do they offer them? Are they useful? What features could make your website stand out?

Design
Is it Appropriate?
Is the design appropriate for the customer base? Is the design appropriate for the company?

Traffic
Visits per day
If you don't track the number of visitors coming to your website, how will you know how effective your internet marketing is? Google Analytics is good program for tracking all types of information about your visitors. I'd recommend using it if you aren't already.

Demographics

You want the demographics of your website to match your ideal client. If you are attracting the wrong demographic you need to make an adjustment to your internet marketing strategy.

Geography
Where your traffic comes from makes a difference. Say you have a business in New Orleans, Louisiana and have traffic from over 20 different countries. It is pretty cool that there are people in Malaysia that have found your site, but it doesn't mean anything. Why not? You are much more likely to do business with someone in the States, especially if you run a local business.

Links
Broken Links
Broken links show that the website is poorly maintained and make you look bad. You should have an error page (404) that is helpful incase it

does happen. An error page also shows up when someone types web address incorrectly, so it is a good idea to have a useful error page whether or not you properly maintain your website.

Inbound links
Inbound links are important because they help determine how you rank in search engines and drive traffic to your site.

Keywords
Organic search engine keywords
Having a high search engine rank on an important keyword will bring in tons of business. It is marketing that comes without direct cost. You must pay with great relevant content that encourages people to link to you.

Paid search engine keywords
You can find out how much people are spending on advertising online,

for what keywords, and what websites they are advertising on.

Where they rank with the Keywords in their Meta tag
If you look at the source code of other people's websites you can find the meta tags. One of the meta tags has the attribute "keyword". It looks like this <meta name="keywords" content="a keyword, another keyword" />. The keywords in the mata tag are the words that they really want to do well in the search results. How well people are doing on their first three or four meta keywords is an indicator of how well their internet marketing is working.

Keep in mind that it is easier to rank well with more specific keywords than more general ones. This blog is ranked 1st for "Richard Beu", but is ranked 29th for "Beu".

History

When was the site was created?
All things equal, an older site will rank higher than a younger site.

When was the site last updated?
This gives you an idea of how often they add new content, if it is updated at all.

When was last time the design changed?
This will let you know how often they redesign their site. Are they interested in keeping up with the times or do they still have the same design they've had for 10 years.

Traffic Trends
Traffic tends to increase or decrease over time. Are they doing better this year than last year. Do they even get enough traffic to measure whether their traffic is going up or down?

Google
Google PageRank
Google returns search results based on a combination of relevance and PageRank. PageRank is on a 0-10 scale with few sites attaining a score above 5.

"Google PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important." - Google

Google Indexed Pages
This tells you how many pages are in the Google index. If a page is not

in the Google index, it will not come up in search results. You can submit a site map to Google to make sure that it includes all of the pages on your site.

Rankings
Alexa Traffic Rank
Alexa.com is a subsidiary of Amazon that audits the frequency of visits on various websites and makes the results public via a ranking system. The lower the number, the more traffic the website gets. Currently my blog, richardbeu.com, is ranked at 4,598,860 or is in the top 14.97%.

Technorati Ranking
Technorati.com is a blog search engine that assigns each blog a ranking based on the number of blogs that have linked to it in the last nine months. It is pretty useful to see who links to you and if your links are going up or down.

Code
Does the site validate?
Search engines crawl valid code better than invalid code and it is a good practice to have valid code.

Do images have ALT text?
People will come to your site from search engines based on your alt text for images. Google and other search engines return results for more than just websites. Don't neglect the image search.

Resources:
Alexa
Quantcast
SpyFu
The Way Back Machine
Website Grader