Identifying your online competition is key to successful online marketing.

B2B companies are often limited by their geographic area, which will prevent growth and make way for the competition to take market share.

Online marketing allows you to reach an almost limitless audience.

But, to succeed you need to know who you’re up against. So, how can you identify your online competition and stay ahead in the game?

Identifying Your Online Competition

The first step is to conduct a thorough Google search using relevant keywords.

Try omitting the local part of the search phrase to compare national vs local search results when doing this. It might seem simple, but a vital step and often overlooked.

Search for your products and services and take note of the websites that appear at the top of the search results. It’s likely these websites are not physically based near you, but from an online marketing perspective you should pay them attention, as they’re your competition – people generally only click on the first few results.

Once you’ve identified who the main players are, it’s helpful to categorise them into three categories:

• Primary Competition – These are your direct competitors. They sell similar products or services, target the same audience, and operate in the same geographic region as you do.
• Secondary Competition – These competitors sell products or services that are similar to yours, but they target a different audience.
• Tertiary Competition – These competitors operate in your niche, but they don’t sell similar products or services. They could be offering complementary services or products, however to the consumer the difference may not be clear.

Marketing Consultant, Howie Connelly from Logic Design says “A businesses online competition may be completely different to what they expected, and represent an untapped opportunity to win new clients.”

What Marketing Efforts Are Your Competitors Undertaking?

Investigating what online marketing they are undertaking will help you understand what’s working and how to improve your own marketing.

You should be looking at their website, social profiles, adverts and backlink profile to get an understanding of the online marketing being undertaken. Chances are they’ll be doing something you’re not – be it good or bad.

Tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and SpyFu can also be useful for identifying what your competitors are doing to generate business. These tools allow you to track your competitors’ keywords, backlinks, and advertising campaigns.

It might be useful to put a SWOT analysis together to help narrow down this list so a few common, actionable pointers to make marketing decision-making easier.

Estimating Your Competitors’ Traffic and Best Content

Knowing how much traffic your competitors’ websites are getting can give you valuable insights into what is working for them. It can also help you identify their best content and see what you need to do to out-rank them on Google.

Tools like SimilarWeb or Ahrefs can be used to estimate your competitors’ website traffic. These tools give you an estimate of how much traffic a website is getting, where it is coming from, and what pages are most popular.

Review the content your competitors are creating, whether it’s in the form of videos, blogs, or infographics. Take a close look at the keywords they are targeting and see if their content strategy is effective. By analysing your competitors’ content, you’ll gain valuable insights into what could be working for them, and what you’ve missed from your own strategy.

Now you’ve identified your competitors’ best content, we should create better content that outperforms theirs. This could involve longer and more comprehensive blog posts, more engaging videos, or using more visually appealing graphics.

Use your competitor analysis to identify what is working for your competitors and find ways to improve upon it.

Final word

Identifying your online competition is an essential part of any online marketing strategy. By understanding who your competitors are and what marketing efforts they are undertaking, you can stay ahead of the game and improve your own marketing efforts. Use the tools and techniques outlined in this article to identify your online competition and gain a competitive advantage in your industry.