Competitive analysis can be used to identify the strengths and weaknesses of both your business’s website and that of your competitors’. Using this information can help you further improve, and capitalize on the weaknesses discovered in your competition.

Analyzing your competition should be something all business and site owners should be doing, but unfortunately, this isn’t the case. To improve your website to be as good as your competitors, you should devote the time and effort needed to analyze them.

Why should you be interested in competitive analysis?

Though you might think you’re ranked number one for the search results of all your important keywords, there would always be another site that might look insignificant to you but is capitalizing on your website’s weaknesses.

A competitive analysis allows you to take a wider view of the situation and identify not just your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, but also yours, even before your competitor notices them. This knowledge can serve as a roadmap for you and would enable you to improve your search rankings and the user experience for the visitors to your website

Who are your competitors?

It’s shocking to some that their biggest competitors aren’t usually the ones they have in mind. Most times your biggest competitors are the websites that lack ranking on the money keywords. But could be making deep progress in other keywords.

To identify the competitors to focus on, it’s imperative that you examine specialization and not just general terms. If you do not do this, you could be missing out on a considerable amount of traffic and conversion. Consider the segments they dominate and determine the level of importance that segment has to your website.