Tools and Tips to Analyze your Competitors Blogs

They say to always keep your friends close and your enemies closer. That’s an important lesson I learned while building my app, NinjaOutreach. If I wanted to beat the competition, I had to know them well. There’s a lot you can learn from your competitors. You learn their wins, you learn their losses.
In this article, I’m going to break down the basics of competitive analysis. By the end of this, you’ll know how to perform blog post analysis on your competitor’s blog.

What is competitive blog post analysis?

Competitive analysis is a marketing strategy to gather deeper understanding on who your competitors are and what makes their business or, in this case, their blog, tick.It’s having an in-depth knowledge of:

• Their successes and failures
• Their content strategy
• What works for them and what doesn’t
• What their marketing channels are
• Why (and how) they are a threat to you
• What opportunities they have that you don’t
• What competitive advantage you have against them (and they against you)

And more.

Simply put, it’s an offense-defense strategy.

Why do a competitive blog post analysis?

Doing a competitive analysis is crucial to anybody running a business or blog. You need to know what you’re up against and how you can win against them.

The goal of a competitive analysis is not only to peek into the inner workings of your competitor but to also validate your own content and marketing strategy.

By doing a competitive analysis, it can help you to:

• Compare and analyze the type of content and tactic that works for them. Ask yourself: can it also work for you? Is it relevant and actionable to your blog?
• Find out where your competitors may be lacking in. Grab the opportunity to fill in the gap. Perhaps your competitor doesn’t use blogging for customer service but yours do – and that’s a great advantage already.
• Learn about their engagement levels vs. yours. Where did they go right? Where did your blog go wrong? Ask yourself these questions to narrow down what influences higher engagement and to identify growth opportunities for your blog.
• Filter out the quality of your content vs. your competitors. Compare your content to get a better idea of what interests readers of your similar niche.

You can read more about the role of competitive analysis in a full-scale marketing plan here:

• Coca-cola Marketing Plan: A-Z Marketing Plan of Coca-Cola

So, how do you begin analyzing your competitors’ blog?

Here are 3 easy steps to get started:

Step 1: Identify who your competitors are.

You can break your competitors down to three categories:

• Direct – competitors offering the same product/services as you For example, if you run a travel blog, your direct competitors would be other travel blogs or leading websites like TripAdvisor.
• Indirect – competitors offering similar products/services to the same target market. For example, your travel blog’s indirect competitors could be food or lifestyle bloggers who also share about their personal travels.
• Substitutes – competitors that offer something users can choose over your product/services. For example, users can choose to use Lonely Planet guide books or YouTube videos over reading your blog.

If you haven’t already identified your competitors, you can do so by quickly Googling “Top [your niche here] Blogs/Bloggers” or try a keyword research tool to flush out competitors using the same keywords as you.

Step 2: Identify their strengths and weaknesses.

There are several ways you can do that and the most popular one is the SWOT analysis.

SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

It’s popular because it’s a simple way to segregate and organize your analysis, giving you lots of room to expand your idea. However, the downside of this method is that it only scratches the surface – it isn’t as in-depth or thorough as I’d like it to be.

Plus, it doesn’t always have verification or data-backed facts to support the analysis.
To me, SWOT is a great place to start off but if you want tangible data in the long run, continue to step 3.

Step 3: Validate and expand your blog post analysis using online tools

Before you jump into these online tools, here are top 5 aspects you should pay close attention to when comparing:

• SEO ranking – how high does their blog rank on Google?
• Site traffic – how many people visit their blog?
• Load time – how fast or slow does the site load?
• Mobile responsiveness – is their site optimized for mobile use?
• Quality of content – how interesting are their topics and how detailed are they?
• Frequency of content – how often do they post? Is there a set pattern?
• Length of content – how many words per article? Is it longer or shorter than yours?
• Number of shares – how engaged are readers to their blog?

Once you’ve addressed those questions, let’s take a look at some tools that can help us.

My 3 best tools for a comprehensive competitive blog analysis

1. Ahrefs

Source: https://ahrefs.com/blog/competitive-analysis/

Ahrefs is a really reliable tool for giving you the information you need. You can use the tool to identify competitors, do your keyword research, and pull key statistics like domain ratings and backlinks from each competitor. On top of that, you can also view their content stats such as most shared, most viewed, and most linked to content. You can even find all the domains sending referrals to your competitors’ sites and set alerts for any mentions of your competitors online.

Ahrefs is a really reliable tool for giving you the information you need. You can use the tool to identify competitors, do your keyword research, and pull key statistics like domain ratings and backlinks from each competitor. On top of that, you can also view their content stats such as most shared, most viewed, and most linked to content. You can even find all the domains sending referrals to your competitors’ sites and set alerts for any mentions of your competitors online.

2. NinjaOutreach

Of course, I use my own tool. I use NinjaOutreach to search for potential or rising competitors using a simple keyword search for any niche. NinjaOutreach pulls up the top results, and I can filter for the number of shares, among others, and get a better view of who the “influencers” are that I need to watch out for. NinjaOutreach also provides other data such as Domain Authority, Page Authority, Alexa ratings, average traffic, and backlinks volume, so you can see and measure your performance against your competitors. You can even see which bloggers are getting tons of social shares for your industry.

3. Neil Patel’s SEO Analyzer

Over at Neil Patel’s site, he has an inbuilt web tool that allows you to compare your website against up to 3 other pages. Just enter your website and your competitors’ and it will generate an SEO and content marketing analysis, marketing checklist, and competitive intelligence such as traffic rank and SEO score.

Conclusion

So there you have it. I hope this helped take your blog to new levels and uncover new opportunities along the way through learning how to perform blog post analysis on your competitors. Got any tips I left out? Let me know in the comments below and we can chat about it.

Hero photo by Sebastian Molina fotografía on Unsplash