If you’re a new business owner, one of the very best ways to get your feet on the ground as to the atmosphere and marketing environment in your industry is to Know Your Business Competition Big and Small.
I think this classic quote from Sun Tzu said it best:
“Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril”
Find out what your competition is doing right, and more importantly, doing wrong – then do it better! Know Your Business Competition Big and Small.
It’s important to understand and get a good picture of the overall competitive industry and marketing trends occurring around you to have a feel for the “terrain” on which you are doing battle! Take this knowledge and try to dig yourself out a niche.
This information has never been easier to get. Utilize all the fantastic tools that the internet now avails you as an entrepreneur. Some of these tools that can give you a competitive advantage we recommend are the following:
SEMrush
This is our first recommended tool for actionable data about you and your competition online. It provides you great keyword research, perspective on your niche online and solid analysis of what you need to know marketing wise.
According to SEMrush:
Get measurable results from online marketing Do SEO, content marketing, competitor research, PPC and social media marketing from just one platform
In our experience
SEMrush is the prime service for an overview picture of ranking trends and competitor analysis.
Ahrefs
Similar to SEMrush, Ahrefs provides you with a plethora of data are both fantastic systems focused on SEO and providing you great information that you need if you plan to do any PPC campaigns (Pay-per-click).
According to Ahrefs:
Ahrefs is an All-in-one SEO toolset, with free Learning materials and a passionate Community & support.
In our experience
Ahrefs data seems to be the best quality in general but its price often makes it overkill for 99% of users.
Spyfu
Spyfu has a similar feature set to the ones above but not as extensive and at a more affordable rate in general. It’s a super solid tool if your new to this whole SEO thing with your business.
According to Spyfu:
[We’re a] marketing revenue engine boosts SEO & PPC profits. SEO marketing suite, PPC analyzer, Historic data, Competitive analysis, Backlink outreach, Unlimited keyword & domain projects, Custom reporting.
In our experience
Spyfu is great for spying on competitor’s Google Ads but we would recommend SEMrush or Ahrefs for keyword research. One thing that Spyfu has over the others is that it makes it really easy for users without a lot of experience to digest the information pretty easily.
Ubersuggest
According to Unersuggest:
Ubersuggest helps you generate keyword ideas for your content marketing strategy and production. With Ubersuggest’s free keyword tool, generate an unlimited number of suggestions for free and take your content creation to the next level while increasing your website's chances of ranking against the competition.
In our experience
Ubersuggest is good as a low budget tool longer term. It’s gets you the basics can definitely give you some good insights. While it could be worth connecting to your search console and testing it, there are better tools, but these come at a higher price.
Google Analytics
This is THE tool you must make sure you have. Analytics can tell you many things, but it depends on what you’re looking at, how it’s implemented and how your managing the data your are tracking. Google Analytics is the tool that helps you follow all of that.
You can find traffic sources and know where they’re landing on your site. This helps you understand a bit of who’s coming into your website and what expectations they might have. You can also know what’s the first thing they see and understand if that’s what they wanted or not.
Traffic flow is also very important. You can know what catches the user’s interest and sort of asses what they are doing on your website and how well you’re meeting with that expectation.
You can identify popular pages and remove content that no one ever sees or seems to get in the way to get to the good content.
Of course, the most powerful measurement is “events” which will tell you if info showed or was clicked on, so you can do things like measure a complete rate for forms or click through rates for call to actions.
According to Google Analytics:
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand.
In our experience
Get this, use it and understand it. Google provides a ton of free resources to learn how to better manage and understand what your system is telling you and how to effectivly use it. I would highly recommend learning more here: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/academy/
What tools and techniques do you use? Share below!
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