What is competitive analysis?

Competitive analysis will give you detailed information about your competitors business be it strategies, customers or success rate. Analyzing this is a very important part for any business, especially when it comes to an online business. To start an E-Business, every company needs to do competitive analysis to identify its major competitors present in the market.

How to do competition analysis?

In an online business, your first source to find out your competition is search engines. Major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, MSN etc will help you find your competitors. All you need to do is type in a few keywords in the search box related to your business; this will give you the list of top competitors in your field.

Steps to follow for getting important data from competitive analysis using internet –

1. Find out top 3 competitors using relevant keywords.
2. Visit their website and study them for concept and theme.

Do a proper design analysis of the competitor’s website-

1. Look and feel of the website.  
2. Navigation and scroll-ability of the website 
3. Layout study. 
4. The software used to design.

After the designing, you need to focus on his marketing strategies-

1. Audience targeted – Local or global.
2. Find out if apart from the online store, does he own an offline store too? 
3. Find out the pricing strategy. 
4. Strategies adopted to conduct online marketing.  
5. Presentation of products on his website.

Lastly, find out if he is adopting any SEO strategies-

1. Find out the list of keywords the competitor is ranking for and on which number. 
2. The keyword density on their websites.  
3. The number of back links to their websites and from where.

It is obvious that your competitors are doing a few right things to stay in business; else they would be out of business. So, always look out for it and try learning and improving yourself by silent observing others.