Case Study: Canon and Xerox
In the 1980s when the Japanese copier manufacturer Canon began to enter the US market, Xerox was convinced that Canon was dumping a product in the US at below cost. Because Xerox was shipping product at a price that was approximately equal to the Xerox’s manufacturing costs. So Xerox decided that they were going to take apart a Canon copier and send all the pieces to their distributor in Japan and get the distributor to come back and tell them what the parts all cost, so that they could bring a dumping action before the US Department of Commerce, and hopefully get punitive tariff put on Canon’s products. Instead what they found out when they got all the pieces back, was that Canon had figured out a less expensive way to build and assemble and in fact service copiers. For example, they found that in some cases Canon had put two screws to hold an assembly in place rather than four, or six that Xerox had. So Xerox took all of this information and added up the cost and they were really shocked to find that Canon in fact could make a profit at that price. And at that point Xerox might have thrown up their hands and said we have to get out of the small desktop copier business, but instead they decided that they would try to figure out what they could do to reduce their own costs. Xerox obviously had its assumptions pretty seriously challenged, and they rose to that challenge and recalibrated.

If you’re involved in startups or business websites of your own, you’ll like this, we’re going to talk about SEO strategy from day 1 to month 9.

What I’ll outline in this post is the method I use to research and formulate an SEO strategy for entering a new niche online. For this case study, I’ll use the example of “puppy dogs”, but really, these techniques can be used with any type of web business.

For a while, I was actually considering starting an online directory that would enable people to buy and sell puppies. The idea came about after I helped a non-technical friend list and sell dogs on the www.puppiesndogs.com site – a process that showed me there may be room for another competitor in this market.

Ultimately, after talking the idea over with my friend, I decided against pursuing this niche, as it would have required a significant amount of effort in vetting eligible owners and recipient homes to ensure that my dogs didn’t wind up in the wrong hands (aka – people who fight dogs). So – although I’m not pursuing this idea, I thought the research and strategy I planned to use to enter this market might be interesting to others who build and promote websites.

Just don’t use this information to start a similar site and sell fighting dogs… Deal? Ok – let’s get started…

Discovering Traffic Potential
Whenever I’m thinking about launching a new site, I start by examining the site I want to beat to learn a little more about the business (in this case, the puppies website listed earlier). I plug their URL into Quantcast and discover that they’re getting roughly 10,000 visitors per month. That’s a good amount of traffic and it shows me that this niche has potential. Next, I plug their URL into Open Site Explorer and take a quick look at how many links and root domains they have (and, consequently, how many I might need to beat them).

In this guide, you will learn how to conduct a competitive analysis: understand market trends, identify your competitors, evaluate opportunities, analyze threats to your organization, and adjust your go-to-market and positioning strategy accordingly.

Table of Contents
Introduction
Part 1: The Basics of Competitive Analysis
What is a Competitive Analysis?
Why should You Should Conduct a Competitive Analysis?
How Not to Use a Competitive Analysis
Part 2: How to Select Competitors for Analysis
How to select competitors for analysis
Part 3: How to Conduct a Competitive Analysis
Company Overview
Go-to-Market Analysis (Customer Acquisition Analysis)
Product Offering and Pricing
Channel
Customer Experience and Customer Success
Tools and Resources and Techniques
Part 4: The Next Steps
Summary

Conducting a high-level competitive analysis is crucial to your online success. Often, your most significant opportunities come from your competitors’ data.

Keeping up with your competitors’ marketing strategies is a great way to identify their strengths and weaknesses. Which you can use for your marketing strategy.

The first step into developing a competitive analysis strategy is determining who your competitors are. Once you’ve established who they are, you can dig into their strategies and walk away with actionable data.

Below are 7 ways to monitor your competitors marketing strategies.

1. Identifying your competitors
The first thing you want to do in your competitive analysis strategy is to identify your competitors. Now, you may already have one competitor in mind, but there’s a possibility that you have other competitors that compete with you on Google that you’re not aware of. With SpyFu, you can quickly identify your competitors by using the domain overview tool.

Overview of SEO and PPC research in SpyFu
Here’s what to watch for:

Note the ratios SEO vs PPC.
Review the core keywords — This helps you gut check them as a key competitor and tells you the direction of their marketing plan.
See the keywords that they buy/rank on that you don’t.
Browse their top Keyword Groups.
Tip> Don’t pay a ridiculous amount of attention to raw numbers just yet. That will come, but for now, you should be assessing where they stand.
Those raw numbers will help you more if you remember estimates and watch for any lopsided or inflated figures. Use them for relative comparisons to other domains. This will prove especially helpful when you move on to Step 2.

Search your domain in SpyFu.

Scroll down the page to your organic and paid competitors. Is the competitor you’re researching actually in this list? If not, keep tabs on them but don’t discount the others. Competitors that aren’t “top of mind” could be bigger threats than the first one you searched.

But it’s not enough to just spy on your competitors’ social media accounts and subscribe to their email lists. You need a strategy behind your efforts to ensure you’re effectively monitoring your competitors on an ongoing basis and updating your view of the competitive landscape as it changes.

Enter the competitive analysis: a document that gives you both a bird’s-eye view and an in-depth understanding of the key players in your market.

In this post, we’ll outline a method for conducting a competitive analysis of your own, geared towards ecommerce businesses.

Whether you’re a seasoned store owner re-evaluating your view of the current market, or you’re getting ready to bring your product to market for the very first time, here are the steps, tools, and even a template (skip to the template) to help you put together your own competitive analysis.

Free: Competitive Analysis Template
By evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of your competition, you can begin to formulate how to give your company an advantage. Download our free competitive analysis template and gain an edge over the competition.

What is a competitive analysis?
A competitive analysis is the analysis of your competitors and how your business compares. By evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of your competition, you can begin to formulate how to give your company an advantage.

Competitive analysis helps a business determine potential advantages and barriers within a target market around a product or service, and generally helps brands monitor how direct and indirect competitors are executing tactics like marketing, pricing, and distribution.

And if you don’t know what that competition is up to, you could be missing out on huge opportunities.

That’s why a competitive analysis is so crucial to your success as a business. It gives you the tools to quickly adapt to any changes in the competitive landscape and potentially capitalize on industry trends that your competitors haven’t even noticed.

So let’s get some basics out of the way…

What is a competitive analysis report?
A competitive analysis report outlines the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors compared to those of your own business.

Typically, a competitive analysis report will contain:

A description of your business’s target market
Details about the features of your product compared to your competitors’ products
A breakdown of current and projected market share, sales, and revenues
Comparisons of pricing models
An analysis of marketing strategy and social media strategy
A description of customer ratings of the features of each competitor

In order to be a leader in your industry, you need to know how to perform a competitive analysis. A competitor analysis is more than a simple SWOT analysis where you find the strength and weaknesses of your market segment. Evaluating your competitors is highly important and must be done through complete market research using an analysis template like the one that we’re going to present in this article.

Finding out where your competition excels doesn’t have to be a burden if you have the right strategy and necessary tools.

What Is a Competitor Analysis?
Why Perform a Competitor Analysis?
How to Conduct Your Competitive Analysis
Step 1. Find Your Top Competitors
Step 2. Analyze Your Competitors Popularity
Step 3. Identify the Public Perception of Competitors
Step 4. Analyze Your Competitors’ Social Media Strategy
Step 5. Perform an SEO Competitor Analysis

What Is a Competitor Analysis?
Competitor analysis in digital marketing is the process of finding strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, relative to those of your own product or service.

There is no exact competitive analysis definition. Yet, you need to know that the strengths within a competitive analysis are the things that make you unique, your key selling point, the ideas around your whole business – which can be about the product or the team. On the opposite side, the weaknesses point out some deficiencies, and things you could improve, when it comes to your brand, or take advantage from, when it comes to the weaknesses of your competitors.

The competitive analysis has the role to make a valid and accurate market positioning and a report on what you are doing best, and where your competitors excel, and learn from that to win more potential customers.
A competitive analysis also means picking the right competitors and looking at analytics that include business metrics, digital marketing analysis, social media metrics.

Knowing what the competitors are doing—how they’re thinking about the market, which tactics they’re using, how they’re crafting messages and design—can make all the difference in the battle for customers.

In addition, competitive analysis can be a treasure trove of conversion optimization insights, yet it often gets skipped. And it’s not just a CRO problem—it’s a marketing-wide phenomenon.

A Conductor study found that 74% agreed that competitive analysis is “important or very important,” but 57% admitted that they weren’t very good at it. From start to finish, this post will show you how to conduct a competitive analysis the right way.

What is competitive analysis?
Competitive analysis is a broad term for the practice of researching, analyzing, and comparing competitors in relation to yourself. Companies do it for a wide variety of reasons—SEO, branding, go-to-market strategy, pricing, etc.—and you can definitely use it for UX and conversion optimization, too.

If you invest in competitive analysis, you’ll reap the benefits of clarity and confidence. You can’t beat a competitive analysis if you want to answer questions like:

What makes my company unique? How do we stand out?
How do customers think of my company compared to competitors?
How does the user experience on my website stack up to the competition?
There’s a great deal to be gained from thorough, regular competitive analysis—usability insights, design advantages, a more convincing value proposition, and of course, ideas for testing.

It can also be used to identify the strengths and weaknesses of both your site and your competitors’ sites for everything from SEO to search feature wins. Utilizing this information, you can discover the areas you are weak that you can improve upon them, as well as identifying the areas where your competitors are weak, and then capitalize on their weaknesses for your site and search performance.

Why Competitive Analysis is Important
Who are the Actual Competitors?
Finding Keyword Gaps
Discovering Popular Pages
Identifying Strengths and Weaknesses
Analyzing On a Page by Page Basis
Backlinks: What You Need to Know
Analyzing Types of Content
Identifying Search Features
Researching Featured Snippets
What to Do After Major Algorithm Updates
Why Competitive Analysis is Important
With competitive analysis, you will be taking a step back and looking at the overall market area, where you stand, who the competitors are, and what the search landscape looks like for crucial keywords.

Even if you are already ranking at the top of the search results for all your most important keywords, there will always be another site that is trying to take over your rankings and capitalizing on your own site’s weaknesses.

Your Roadmap for Success
Competitive analysis can be used as a roadmap for what you need to do to improve your search rankings and the user experience for the visitors to your site. You will always discover things about what your competitors are doing that is superior to your own site, such as better search rankings. You might also discover they are doing better at specific aspects of the search results, such as dominating all the featured snippets or having an immense number of pages that show up in people also ask.

Even if you are ranking number one for what you think are your most important keywords, if they dominate in featured snippets, you are missing out on a considerable amount of potential traffic.

How to steal your competitors’ traffic
SEO competitor analysis (aka competitive analysis) works as a powerful research strategy in helping you to rank higher, get more traffic, and earn more conversions. Its magic happens by uncovering SEO opportunities you may not have seen otherwise.

Competitor analysis helps successfully answer questions like:

Who are my actual SEO competitors?
What keywords should I target?
What topics should I cover?
Where can I find links?
What do I need to beat the competition?
There are many ways to do a competitive analysis for SEO, but the basic principle works like this: analyze what’s working for your competition (keywords, content, links, etc.) and leverage this intelligence to improve your own SEO efforts.

Get the free template!
We’ve included a nifty Google Sheets template to guide you through the steps and help generate an actionable report.

Download now
What exactly is SEO competitive analysis?
SEO competitive analysis involves researching the links, keywords, content, and more of your SEO competitors in order to reverse-engineer the most successful elements of these tactics into your own SEO strategy.

Instead of guessing which keywords to target, content to create, or links to build, you can instead see what’s already working for others, and build upon that success.

Consider a real-world example: Imagine you operate a grocery store — one of three competing stores in town. Your customers are happy, but you know they also visit other stores because they can’t buy everything in one place. So you go on a road trip to gather competitive intelligence. You visit the other stores to understand the popular items they offer. By offering these items yourself — or even superior ones — you help your customers make fewer trips, and in turn, you gain more business.