Ever wanted to know how your competitors acquire web traffic and customers? By reverse engineering their strategies, you can identify their sources of traffic, organic search efforts, social engagement, advertising channels, partnerships, top-performing content, and website structure.
Goal
This exercise will help you understand competitor tactics and find opportunities to optimise your own traffic acquisition and customer acquisition strategies.
Instructions & Resources
Use the ‘4. Marketing’ tab inside the Competitor research Google Sheet to store your findings
Instructions
List the Traffic Numbers:
- Use www.similarweb.com to find traffic data for each competitor.
- Take note of total visits, bounce rate, pages per visit, average visit duration, and channel distribution (direct, referrals, search, social, mail, display).
List the Organic Traffic Data:
- Utilise www.moz.com/domain-analysis to analyse competitors' organic traffic efforts.
- Identify estimated search traffic, domain authority, and the ranking of keywords in different positions (top 1, top 3, top 5, etc.).
- Consider using Google's keyword planner tool to explore competitor domains' ranking keywords.
Evaluate Social Engagement:
- Visit competitors' social media pages and examine their following numbers and recent posts.
- Take note of follower counts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok, as well as posting frequency and average post engagements.
Identify Advertising Channels:
- Explore competitors' advertising efforts on different platforms.
- Use tools like www.semrush.com for Google ads, www.facebook.com/ads/library for Facebook and Instagram ads, and the LinkedIn company page or www.linkedin.com/company/{{CompanyName}}/posts/?feedView=ads for LinkedIn ads.
- Visit www.ads.tiktok.com/business/creativecenter/inspiration/topads/pc/en for TikTok ads.
Discover Partnerships:
- Use a Google search query to identify if competitors are focusing on partnerships.
- Example query: "Site:competitor-domain.com AND partner" (replace "competitor-domain.com" with the actual competitor domain).
Find Top-Performing Content:
- Use tools like www.similarweb.com, www.moz.com/domain-analysis, and www.semrush.com to identify competitors' top pages.
- To find gated content, use a search query like "Site:competitor-domain.com AND filetype:PDF" (replace "competitor-domain.com" with the actual competitor domain).
Scrape the Site Architecture:
- Utilise www.screamingfrog.co.uk to scrape your competitor's website and visualise the site architecture.
- Follow the instructions on www.screamingfrog.co.uk/site-architecture-crawl-visualisations/ to create a crawl visualisation.
- Download the crawl image and insert it into a template for further analysis.
By systematically analysing your competitor's web traffic and customer acquisition strategies, you can gain valuable insights into their tactics and identify areas of improvement or potential opportunities for your own business. This exercise will help you refine your traffic acquisition and customer acquisition strategies to drive growth and stay competitive in your industry.