Before we get started, I’d like to point out why you need to analyze your competitors, and specifically competitors in your niche. You need it because:

  • It’ll help you understand how they made it;
  • What methods they used;
  • Their tactics;
  • Expectations about your marketing budget.

What you need to to (step-by-step) is the following:

  • Find your competitors;
  • Determine their traffic sources;
  • Break down each source.

Finding your competitors

One way you can find your competitors is by using Alexa. From the homepage click the top sites tab, select the “By category” tab and choose your category, followed by your subcategory (or a few). Then you will see what sites are popular in your niche.

You can also find your competitors with the help of the SEOQuake plugin. Here’s how:

  • Install SEOQuake
  • Disable Instant search in Google
  • Set you SERP to show 100 results per page
  • Sort by Alexa.

This way you’ll be able to locate the most relevant sites in your niche, which basically means rivals.

SEMRush is another tool that allows you to find competitors in organic search. You just need to go to the site and type in your domain name in the search text box. That done just click “Search”, and you’ll see a whole lot of valuable info about your site such as organic keywords you have high rankings for, ads keywords (if you have such), competitors in organic search, competitors in ads, unique ads overview, potential ads/traffic buyers (organic to ads competition), potential ads/traffic sellers (ads to organic competition), and a keyword cloud for your site. So, this tool does not only show competitors but allows to get the idea who you can try to sell ads to and buy ads from

Your competitors’ traffic

Once you’re done with finding your competitors, you need to understand where they get their traffic from. You want use your Google Analytics account to find that out. In order to analyze your competitors, you can go to SEMRush, type in your domain name, hit the “Search” button. And in the “Organic keywords” section, you can click on the icon for exporting results. Now we know where exactly our competitors’ traffic is coming from. Let’s break it down for better understanding. And again, you can use SEMRush to see which exact keywords and pages give traffic to a specific site.

As we all know traffic can also come from referrals. There are a few useful sites that allow to collect the data as for a particular site’s link profile. One of them is Ahrefs which also shows the anchors that your competitors are getting link juice from.

PPC

If you want to fight with your rival in the PPC advertising, you need to first figure out their strategy. You can use SEMRush for that as well, because it shows information on the keywords your competitors buy ads for and what they pay for them. Having the info, you can make up the budget that you’ll need for competing with them. Another really useful tool is SpyFu It allows to see all sorts of PPC metrics of high value for you as a competitor.

The bottom line

If you have a bunch of competitors and not sure how to tackle the issue, you need to firstly find out where they get their traffic from, analyze it and get your own traffic from the same or similar sources. And that’s’ not rocket science.

Guest post by Kenneth von Rauch, an avid and enthusiastic web design and web development specialist who can show you how to make a website.

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