A little competition never hurt anyone, right? As an online retailer, you’ve probably heard that a little competition can be a good thing. It’s reassuring to know that what we sell is in demand and there is a greater opportunity to capture more market share.
What you may not know is just how valuable of an asset your online competitors can be to your eCommerce business. Your top rivals hold a wealth of information that can be used to your advantage.
It’s all there for the taking; you just need to extract it by performing a competitive analysis. Here are just a handful of benefits that a competitive analysis can offer.
Avoid Costly Mistakes
The path to eCommerce success is rife with costly mistakes that can sink a good business. By analyzing your competition, you can learn from their failures and avoid making the same mistakes that could potentially ruin your business.
One example of this is with your PPC campaigns. By seeing which keywords your competitors are ranking for and which keywords are driving the most traffic to their store, you can save yourself hundreds—if not thousands—when you bid on keywords.
Know Where You Stand
It’s always important to know where your eCommerce business stands in relation to your competitors. While you may think that your conversion rates are good, how do they compare to others in your niche?
Lucky for you, we’ve made a tool that will tell you that—and more. With our free eCommerce Scorecard, you can easily compare your key metrics to your industry peers and see where you stack up against the competition.
With knowledge comes power. Once you know where you stand, you can develop effective strategies to beat the competition and drive more sales to your online store.
Spot New Industry Trends
Being able to predict upcoming trends in your industry is a huge asset for your eCommerce store. By gathering competitive intelligence, you can analyze the data you collected from your competitors and predict where the market is shifting.
When Mobilegeddon first made waves in 2015, smart eCommerce marketers analyzed their competitors, which allowed them to predict when their market began shifting toward mobile devices. Correctly anticipating this move allowed them to provide a better user experience for their visitors and capture more market share.
Amplify Your Content Marketing
There are plenty of ways in which you can piggyback off your competition’s content marketing and drive more traffic to your eCommerce store. By simply looking at their blog, you can make note of what types of content are performing well and the frequency of their posting. If you share the same market, chances are good that your audience will enjoy similar types of content.
Another way to spy on their content marketing is by seeing how they use content to move prospective customers down the marketing funnel. You may get ideas for how to use your content to persuade consumers to purchase from your online store.
Improve Your SEO
You can take a peek on a competitor’s backlink profile with a tool like Backlink Monitor. This tool allows you to see where your competition’s backlinks are coming from and will notify you when they get new links with good SEO value.
By keeping track of their backlink profile, you can take the appropriate steps to stay on top of your game and climb the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Additionally, keep track of your own backlinks so that you can interact with those who are linking to you, allowing you to establish relationships for greater opportunities.
Set Yourself Apart from the Competition
Every successful eCommerce business has a set of value propositions that makes them stand apart from the rest. If you don’t have persuasive value propositions, consumers aren’t going to be interested in purchasing from you.
Analyzing your competitor’s value propositions is important because it will help you craft your own. Already have value propositions? Performing a competitive analysis is still necessary because you need to know how to communicate your value propositions to make them different from your peers.
Final Words
Performing a competitive analysis is essential if you want to solidify your standing in the eCommerce marketplace and surge ahead of your competitors. The competitive intelligence you obtain can provide you with invaluable insight that will improve all aspects from your business, paving the way for explosive growth.
Do you know where you stand among your industry peers? Download your free eCommerce scorecard to find out!
