As a blogger, one of the best ways to validate your blogging ideas and remove time-consuming strategies that’ll fail is to observe what works for your competitors. And this is what competitive analysis can help you accomplish.

Using competitive analysis, you can learn more about your competitors’ strategies. This, in turn, enables you to create an effective content strategy that will make your blog stand out while focusing on the type of content your audience craves.

In this guide, we will go over what competitive analysis is. By the end of this article, you’ll know the steps required to carry out this analysis and how you can use competitive analysis to make your blog an irresistible one.

What is Competitive Analysis?

Competitive analysis is an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of your key competitors. The purpose of this strategy is to spot mistakes and opportunities that can help you outperform them.

In blogging, competitive analysis is a technique to learn more about who your blogging competitors are and the factors that influence their blogs. It entails having an in-depth knowledge of the following and more about other competing bloggers:

  • Their content strategy
  • Their achievements and shortcomings
  • What works and what doesn’t work for them
  • The opportunities they have that you do not have
  • Why they are a threat to you, and how they do so

Why Carry Out Competitive Blog Analysis?

Conducting a competitive analysis is highly required for anyone running a blog. As a blogger, you should know the bloggers you are competing with and how you can win against them.

The purpose of a competitive analysis isn’t just to gain insight into how your competitor’s blog works. Instead, it’s to validate your content strategy to make your blog stand out and irresistible.

So, How Do You Start Analyzing Your Competitors’ Blogs?

There are steps you can follow that can help you analyze your competitors’ blogs. They include:

#1. Identify Your Competitors

The first step to analyzing your competition’s blog is to identify who these competitors are. To achieve this, you can divide your competitors into the following three groups:

  • Direct competitors: These are competitors that offer similar goods or services to yours. For instance, if you run a travel blog, leading websites like TripAdvisor or other travel blogs would be your direct competitors.
  • Indirect competitors: These ones offer similar services or products to the same target market. For instance, indirect competitors of your travel blog could be lifestyle or food bloggers who write about their own personal travels.
  • Substitute competitors: These competitors offer what the users can choose over yours. For instance, users can prefer to use YouTube videos instead of reading your blog.

#2. Identify Your Competitors’ Strengths and Weaknesses

You can identify the weaknesses and strengths of your competitor’s blogs in many ways. However, the most popular means is using the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis.

Many uses SWOT analysis because it is an easy way to separate and arrange your analysis, giving you plenty of room to expand your idea. SWOT analysis is a great place to start. However, the next step (using online tools) will provide tangible data in the long run.

#3. Using Online Tools

Before using the online tools, the following are the top eight factors you should carefully pay attention to when comparing your competitor’s blog to yours:

  • Load time (how fast or slow the site loads)
  • Mobile responsiveness (if their site is mobile-friendly)
  • Quality of content (how engaging and detailed their topics are)
  • Number of shares (their readers’ level of engagement with their blog)
  • SEO ranking (how well-ranked their blog is on Google)
  • Site traffic (the number of people that visit their blog)
  • Frequency of content (how often they post and whether there is a set pattern)
  • Content length (word count per article and if they differ from yours)

After addressing these questions, you can then use the online tools. Listed below are some of the best tools you can use for a comprehensive competitive blog analysis:

A. NinjaOutreach

By using a simple keyword search for any niche, you can use NinjaOutreach to find potential competitors. NinjaOutreach displays the top results, and you can filter them according to various criteria, such as the number of shares. And this is to get a better view of the influencers to watch out for.

The online tool also provides other data like page authority, domain authority, backlink volume, and average traffic so you can measure your performance to that of your competitors. Using NinjaOutreach, you can also find out which bloggers in your sector receive tons of social media shares.

B. Neil Patel’s SEO Analyzer

Neil Patel’s SEO analyzer is an inbuilt web tool that lets you compare your website with up to three other pages. When you enter your website and those of your competitors, this online tool will produce an SEO and content marketing analysis. It will also generate a marketing checklist and competitive analysis like traffic rank and SEO score.

C. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another online tool you can use to identify your competitors. You can also use it to perform keyword research and gather vital statistics, such as domain ratings and backlinks from the identified competitors.

Additionally, you can see information about their content statistics, such as their most viewed, shared, and linked-to content. You can even track down every domain that sends referrals to their sites and set up alerts for any online mentions of them.

Using Competitive Analysis to Make Your Blog Irresistible

You can work to improve your site with the help of the information gathered after a competitive analysis. For instance, let’s assume that you’ve completed a competitive analysis of one of the leading competitors in the same sector as yours.

Following the competitive analysis, you discover that the reason behind your blog’s poor traffic is that the other blog publishes better articles that appeal to the audience.

Upon this discovery, you can’t only work towards creating an article of the same quality level. Remember, the goal of conducting a competitive analysis as a blogger is to outperform your competitors and make your blog stand out.

So, in this case, you need to strive to write better articles than theirs. You might even consider hiring a professional writer. Not only will this draw more visitors to your blogs. It’ll also give returning visitors reasons to keep coming back.

Bottom Line

Carrying out competitive analysis should be a must for anyone that runs a blog. It will undoubtedly help take your blog to new levels and make you stand out among other bloggers.