Audit as an ace up your sleeve when researching the competition

First come, first served

Competition is the one thing that will always be there. It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, you will always have competitors. And no matter how good you think your product or service is, there’s somebody out there who has something better. So it’s important that you know who your competition is and what they are doing in order to stay ahead of them.

An effective campaign plan includes five key components: the target market, the product or service, the price, the promotion and the distribution. A successful marketing campaign is always well planned out with each of these factors being considered before proceeding with the rest of the strategy. The first step in developing an effective campaign plan is conducting a competition audit.

What is an audit?

An audit is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of your current website, and it can help you identify opportunities for improvement. Competitions audits evaluate how well your company is doing in terms of competing with other companies in the same space through search engine results pages. It consists of collecting information about the organization’s competitors including what keywords they rank for, their backlinks and social media engagement. Then you will use this data to create a strategy which may include link building, content creation or targeted advertising campaigns.

Benefits

• A competition audit allows you to track progress more accurately.
• It helps teams understand their strengths and weaknesses better by breaking down data from past performances.
• This data can then be used to improve current strategies.
• Competition audits are essential for finding trends that were previously not identified or taken advantage of by competitors, providing opportunities for growth.

How to start an audit?

Choosing the competitors

The first step in conducting an audit is identifying which competitors you will be comparing yourself against. This should be done by using the following criteria:

• similarity of products,
• similarity of services,
• similarity of pricing,
• market share,
• relevancy,
• size.

Building database

A competition audit is an analysis of the competition within your industry. It can be conducted before you launch your product, while you are running it or after you have launched it. It is important because it will give you an idea on how your business will fare in the market. The data collected during this process is usually used as a benchmark for future comparisons and marketing efforts.

After you’ve chosen which competitors to use for your audit, it’s time to consider how you want to segment and compare them. There are two main ways you can do this: by country or by product line. If you choose to look at competitors by product line then you need to make sure that each competitor has the same mix of segments, so if one competitor sells both hardware and software then they need to have hardware and software segments. If all the companies offer different mixes then they should be compared by country.

Analyzing on-page SEO

Analyzing your competitor’s on-page SEO will help you better understand what they are doing and how they are ranking. This will also give you insight into their keywords, content, and user experience. It is worth spending the time to analyze their website so that you can see how it differs from yours and where you may be able to make improvements for your site.

Checking backlinks

When you’re conducting a competition audit, make sure to check your competitors’ backlinks. This can help you learn about their content marketing strategies and see if any of the links will provide value for your website. You should use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs or Moz Link Explorer to get access to all the necessary information about your competitors’ websites. With these tools, you can see all their domains and which ones they link to. With these insights in mind, you can start thinking about possible strategies that could help you win against them.

Analyzing comments and citations

Tons of comments and citations came in with questions about what is included in a competition audit. A competition audit is the process of reviewing your current competitions, figuring out how you can better position your company against them, and then developing strategies for taking on the competition.

Last words

A competition audit is an important step in any marketing campaign as it will help you understand where your strengths and weaknesses are. Once you have the results of the audit, it can be used for future campaigns to improve success rates. It may seem daunting at first but with time, practice, patience and dedication, conducting a competition audit becomes second nature. This is a particularly important step when you want to start a new campaign or product.