Papers & Articles

22/05/2007  |  Competitive Analysis, what can we learn?

You can learn a great deal by looking at your competitor’s website. Competitive Analysis is an important part of the strategic planning process. Some businesses think it is best to get on with their own plans and ignore the competition. Others become obsessed with tracking the actions of competitors often by using any method available. Many businesses are happy simply to track the competition, looking at their strategy and reacting to changes. But what is the best thing to do? 

Competitive analysis or competitor monitoring has several important roles in strategic planning for your website as well as for the whole company:

• To help management understand their own competitive advantages/disadvantages relative to competitors.
• To generate an understanding of competitors’ past, present (and most importantly) future strategies.
• To provide an informed basis to develop strategies to achieve competitive advantage in the future.
• To help forecast the returns that may be made from future investments (e.g. how will competitors respond to a new product or pricing strategy?)

There are many different areas of a competitor’s website that can be analysed and information learnt from it.

To perform competitive analysis, you can use specific softwares to scan your competitor’s website, or this can be done manually. The best would probably be to use both in order to be sure to cover every aspect of a site so you can get an accurate picture of where your website stands compared to your competition. By going through your competitor’s homepage, site organisation, origin of their inbound links, or the keywords they are targeting, you can benchmark them and improve your existing website.

To conclude your competitor's website can tell you a lot and help you with your site. More important changes in the site can tell you how your competitors are doing, what are your competitors' changes in marketing strategy, pricing strategy or development process.