Researching Competitors Made Easy With 5 Simple Tools

Researching Competitors Made Easy With 5 Simple Tools

Collecting the competitive intelligence is often overlooked by E-commerce merchants. Grasping a deep understanding about how your competitors work may work wonders for E-commerce businesses. It is difficult to make modest decisions and entice new customers without knowing what your competitors are up-to. Here is a small guide to help you identify your top 5 competitors and guide through 8 simple tools to gather the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors.

Identifying Your Top 5 Competitors

There must be certain keywords specific to your industry. The search begins here! Seeking competitor’s rank in Google for the keywords you target is imperative. Make a list of the keywords bringing major traffic to your website and search them on Google. If you do not have an e-commerce store yet, searching for the relevant keywords during the pre- launch research will be an advantage. Simply scribble the names ranking on the first page.

List the strategies your competitors are opting to grow their business. Method of emphasis on the value preposition, their prices compared to yours, their shipping options and call to actions, site optimization for mobile, social media presence, interaction with customers, product photography etc. are important fields of research.

Now when you have a list of your top-5 competitors, it’s now time for using the tools mentioned below to gather in-depth information about what your E-commerce competitors are doing:

1. The Ultimate Keyword Tool- “Google AdWords”
The Google AdWords tool simplifies analyzing keywords and the traffic generated through them. It also allows you to specify you search by mentioning the exact URLs and the product categories like footwear, apparels or other as per your interest. It also gives an idea about how much your competitors are paying for their PPC campaigns. The Google Traffic Estimator will find out the number of click-through and bid prices for the traffic generating keywords.

2. “Whois”- Domain Tool
Whois will let you know the record of your competitor’s domain- the registration date, server statistics, contact information, in/out links and also the other domains in the name of same registrant.

3. “Alexa”
Alexa is a free service since 1996 to analyse the traffic on any website. On typing your competitor’s URL, Alexa displays its global rank, number of site linking in, audience insight, search analytics, the site load time and much more. There may be some imprecision with this information as it displayed the results based on those who have installed Firefox, Google chrome extension or IE.

4. Get free updates from “Google Alerts”
This will help you receive latest updates about the relevant Google result based on your queries. Setting up a query in the name of your completion will help embark new developments that may affect your E-commerce business.

5. Page Similarity Comparison Tool- “SEO Book”
Compare information like page titles, common phrases and meta-titles on your competitors’ homepages with “SEO Book”.

The Repercussion
After assessing your competitor’s website completely it’s now time to analyze your own E-commerce store and define your marketing strategy. Try to objectively figure out the tactics used by your competitors and be critical in your approach. Now when you are set with all this information, use your observations for optimizing your E-commerce store. Taking advantage of your competitors’ weakness is the best thing that works. Try to find out the areas in which your competitors are beating you and become more competitive. But in this attempt, don’t churn out the factors that make you unique and stand out of your competitors.