How to get competitor analysis right
It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. The short answer to competitor analysis is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
What it costs to ignore
Look for the gaps, not just for what to copy. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Their weaknesses are your positioning
- Check what they rank for that you do not
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Check what they rank for that you do not. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
A reasonable first step
How to tell if yours is fine
Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Three things worth confirming about competitor analysis before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Their weaknesses are your positioning — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.