What Is a Competitor Analysis?
How to conduct an in-depth competitor analysis.
How to conduct an in-depth competitor analysis.
If you’re looking for ways to stay ahead of the trends in your industry, you need to know what your competitors are up to. That’s where competitor analysis comes in. By understanding their strengths, weaknesses, and strategies, you can develop a unique plan for your brand and gain a crucial edge to stand out against your competitors.
But how do you conduct competitor analysis effectively? Read our blog below to find out what a competitor analysis is and how to conduct one that reflects your individual business needs.
A competitor analysis is the process of evaluating your competitors to identify their strategies, strengths, and weaknesses. This helps businesses make informed decisions and develop more effective marketing, sales, and product strategies.
By conducting a thorough competitor analysis, you can identify market gaps and opportunities, benchmark your brand against competitors, refine your marketing and pricing strategies, improve your product or service offering, and anticipate market trends and shifts.
Competitor analysis isn’t just about knowing who you’re up against — it’s about uncovering actionable insights that can shape your strategy and drive growth.
Taking a deep dive into your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses allows you to spot gaps in the market, benchmark more effectively and refine your approach. It’s important not to get tunnel vision when assessing a competitor’s performance – you should outline their approach across marketing, pricing, product development and customer experience.
The competitor analysis process empowers marketers to make strategic decisions based on real data rather than implementing guesswork.
We recently conducted a SWOT analysis for an e-commerce client in the health and well-being sector. This client has grown significantly with our support over the last 4 years, they have solid traffic, competitive pricing and high conversion rates. But we uncovered a new opportunity – all their big competitors are now offering subscription services.
We helped the client to implement a subscription model, incentivising sign-ups by offering discounts. We also implemented direct debit payment options, simplifying the subscription model. As a result, conversions on eligible subscription products rose by 24% over 3 months, and customer lifetime value (LTV) rose by 19% over the same period.
Opportunities like this are often overlooked; product bundling, service flexibility and even payment method flexibility can make all the difference. Competitor analysis gives you the clarity to spot quick wins, as well as giving you the confidence to act.
Start by conducting market research to identify your direct and indirect competitors. Direct competitors offer similar products or services, while indirect competitors target the same audience with alternative solutions. By leveraging competitive intelligence, you can uncover key trends within your industry.
Use competitor research tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Google Search to uncover key players in your industry.
Conduct a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) for each competitor. A strategic analysis helps you focus on key areas where your competitors excel or fall short. By performing a competitive SWOT analysis, you’ll uncover opportunities your business can leverage.
Below are some areas to look into when performing a SWOT matrix to guide your understanding of your competitors strengths and weaknesses:
What do they do well?
Do they have strong brand recognition?
Are they known for high-quality products or services?
Do they have superior customer service?
Are they dominating the market in a particular area?
Where do they fall short?
Are there common customer complaints?
Do they lack innovation or struggle with outdated products?
Are their prices too high or too low?
Do they have a weak online presence?
Are there emerging market trends they aren’t capitalising on?
Can you offer a better customer experience?
Are there gaps in their product range that you can fill?
Can you target an underserved audience?
Are they expanding into your niche?
Are there external factors (economic downturns, regulations) that could impact them and you?
Are they investing heavily in marketing and innovation?
Could new competitors disrupt the market?
By breaking down these areas, you’ll be able to identify where you can outperform your competition and create strategies that leverage your strengths.
Evaluate your competitor’s digital advertising strategies to identify gaps in your own approach.
Find out how competitors attract and retain customers by analysing their content marketing (blogs, videos, social media posts), advertising (Google Ads, paid social campaigns), SEO tactics (keywords, backlinks, site structure), and email marketing strategies.
This insight can inform your marketing approach and highlight potential gaps to exploit.
Customer experience is a crucial differentiator. Check online reviews, testimonials, and customer feedback to understand how people feel about your competitors.
Consider using tools like Trustpilot and Google Reviews to gain insights into their strengths and pain points. Take note of common complaints, as they might highlight an opportunity for your business to excel where they struggle.
If possible, purchase a competitor’s product or service to assess quality, user experience, and packaging. Pay attention to ease of use, features and benefits, customer support quality, and after-sales service.
Analysing these qualities will give you a better understanding of where your product stands in comparison.
A strong online presence is often a sign of a well-established competitor. Review their website, blog, and social media platforms to determine how they engage with their audience.
Key things to analyse include:
By comparing these elements to your own, you can spot areas for improvement in your digital strategy.
Competitor analysis isn’t a one-time task – it’s an ongoing process which should be monitored regularly. Set up alerts with tools like Google Alerts and Mention to stay updated on competitors’ new developments, product launches, and marketing campaigns.
Regular tracking ensures you stay ahead and can quickly adapt to any shifts in the market.
There are several tools available for competitor research, but choosing the right ones – and knowing how to use them effectively – is what makes the difference between surface-level insight and strategic advantage.
At Clever Clicks, our team uses a refined mix of tools to uncover competitor strategies and build data-driven campaigns. Here are some of the platforms we use and how they contribute to more informed decision-making.
SEMrush and Ahrefs are two of the most comprehensive SEO research platforms available. These tools allow you to dig deep into your competitors’ search presence – from the keywords they rank for to the backlinks they’re building and the content that drives the most engagement.
We use them to perform keyword gap analyses, monitor shifts in ranking positions, assess backlink quality, and reverse engineer what’s working in your competitors’ strategies. Both tools allow you to identify areas where you can gain ground in search visibility and outrank key players in your industry.
SimilarWeb gives a high-level overview of your competitors’ digital performance. It estimates monthly web traffic and breaks it down by source. It also offers insight into audience behaviour, top landing pages, and referring domains.
We use SimilarWeb to benchmark our clients against their competitors, identify traffic-driving channels, and uncover referral partnerships or affiliate strategies that are flying under the radar. It’s particularly useful when you’re planning a broader digital strategy or assessing market share.
BuzzSumo focuses on what content is performing best across the web and social platforms. It helps identify which articles, blog posts, videos or infographics are gaining traction and being widely shared, along with who’s linking to them.
By gaining deeper market insights, you can spot trends your competitors are missing. If your competitors are consistently publishing content that earns links or goes viral on social media, we analyse the format, topics, and promotional tactics – then help you create content that’s designed to outperform it.
Google Alerts is a simple but effective way to stay updated whenever your competitors are mentioned online – in news articles, press releases, reviews, or blog posts.
We use this tool to track new product launches, PR activity, and changes in brand positioning. It ensures we’re aware of competitor movements and can help our clients react quickly – whether that’s capitalising on a gap or responding to a new market trend.
Social Blade tracks social media performance across platforms like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and X (formerly Twitter). It provides visibility into follower growth, posting frequency, and engagement rates over time.
By analysing this data, we’re able to understand which channels your competitors are prioritising, how their audience is responding, and what types of content are resonating. This helps shape more targeted and effective social media strategies – particularly when entering a new platform or scaling up existing activity.
Each tool serves a specific purpose and offers powerful insights into different areas of your competitor’s online performance. Gathering data is the easy part, but turning insights into clear, actionable steps for your business is what allows you to capture market share from your competitors.
Once you’ve gathered all this information, it’s time to use it to refine your own strategy. Here’s how:
Improve Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP): Identify areas where competitors fall short and make them your strengths.
Enhance Your Marketing Approach: Use their successes and failures to guide your own content, advertising, and SEO strategies.
Optimise Your Pricing and Offers: Ensure your products or services are positioned competitively based on market trends.
Refine Your Customer Experience: Learn from competitor reviews and customer complaints to improve your own service.
A well-executed competitor analysis helps you refine your strategy, identify opportunities, and stay ahead of the competition. By using SWOT analysis and competitor research tools, you can uncover valuable insights that shape your brand’s growth. Competitor research should be an ongoing process, allowing you to change direction when necessary and seize new opportunities as they arise.
Here at Clever Clicks Digital we offer competitor analysis as a one-off service or as part of our SEO/PPC retainers. During competitor analysis, we unveil the tactics and strategies your competitors are employing. This includes insights into their areas of focus and the allocation of their marketing budget.
Contact our team of experts to find out more.
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