In online marketing, it is not enough to simply be present – the key to success lies in always being one step ahead of the competition.
A targeted competitive comparison provides valuable insights into the strategies, strengths and weaknesses of your competitors.
Why should I carry out a competitive analysis?
Digitalisation has fundamentally changed the way companies compete with each other. Traditional boundaries are becoming blurred and new competitors can appear seemingly overnight.
A thorough competitive comparison helps to recognise trends early, drive innovation and target marketing efforts.
By implementing a regular competitive comparison in your marketing strategy, you create the conditions for sustainable growth. You identify gaps in the market that you can fill with your products or services and discover opportunities for differentiation.
This proactive approach enables you to react flexibly to market changes and utilise your resources efficiently. Ultimately, a well-founded competitive comparison leads to better decisions and a stronger market position for your company.
The basics of competitor analysis
A competitor analysis is a systematic process for analysing and evaluating your competitors in the market. The aim is to gain a comprehensive understanding of your competitors’ strategies, tactics and performance.
It’s about understanding how your competitors operate online, what channels they use and how they interact with their target audience. These insights are invaluable for refining your own digital strategy and gaining a competitive advantage.
Effective competitor analysis is not a one-off event, but an ongoing process. The market is constantly changing, new technologies are emerging and customer needs are evolving. It is therefore important to regularly update and adapt your analysis. This is the only way to ensure that your marketing strategies remain relevant and effective.
Advantages of a thorough comparison with the competition
The competitive comparison offers several advantages and is valuable in every phase of a company. The most important advantages include
The insights are extremely valuable for refining your marketing strategies and clearly identifying your unique selling points.
You will be able to develop strategies that precisely target gaps in the market, giving you a competitive advantage.
You learn from the successes and mistakes of others and implement best practices in your own company.
By analysing your competitors' keywords, content and ads, you can improve your own strategy in a targeted manner.
Key elements of an effective competitive analysis
An effective competitive analysis in marketing includes several key elements that allow you to get a comprehensive picture of your competitors.
- Start by identifying your main competitors. These can be direct competitors who offer similar products or services, but also indirect competitors who provide alternative solutions for the same customer needs. Consider both established companies and up-and-coming start-ups that could potentially disrupt the market.
- Then analyse your competitors’ marketing strategies in detail. Depending on the channel, there are different approaches and metrics that you should consider in order to effectively understand the competition and adapt your strategy accordingly.
Competitor analysis in SEO: Ranking, keywords and backlinks
When it comes to SEO, it is important to measure the visibility of your website compared to your competitors in the search engines. Here are some important points that you should analyse:
Keyword analysis: Find out which keywords your competitors are ranking for. Use tools to monitor the keyword rankings of your competitors. Pay particular attention to search volume, search intent and organic traffic.
Backlink analysis: Analyse the backlink profile of your competitors. Tools help you to analyse the number and quality of your competitors’ backlinks.
On-page SEO: Compare the structure and content of your competitors’ websites. Pay attention to title tags, meta descriptions, content quality and internal links.
SEA competitor analysis: ad strategies and keyword performance
Competitive analysis in SEA is about understanding the paid advertising strategies of your competitors. A thorough analysis helps you to place targeted adverts that challenge your competitors. The most important factors include:
Keyword analysis: Find out which keywords your competitors are using for their Google Ads adverts.
Ad structure and copy: Pay attention to how your competitors’ adverts are formulated. Which call-to-actions (CTAs) do they use? What benefits do they emphasise? This can help you optimise your own ad copy.
Ad placement and budget: Track where competitors are placing their ads and what placements they are targeting (e.g. Google search results, display network).
Brand bidding: Regularly check the auction data in Google Ads. You can see whether competitors are bidding on your brand keywords and what percentage of impressions are being lost as a result. If competitors use your brand in their ad texts, you can report this to Google and reclaim the top position in the search results.
Social media competition comparison: engagement and advertising campaigns
In social media marketing, a thorough analysis of the competition is essential in order to identify trends and successful strategies. This allows you to optimise your own presence and learn from best practices:
Followers and engagement: Analyse the number of followers and the engagement (likes, comments, shares) of competitors on the relevant social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.
Content analysis: Pay attention to what type of content your competitors are posting. Are they videos, infographics or text posts? What topics and hashtags do they use? Analysing the content mix helps you to refine your own content strategy.
Advertising campaigns: Analyse your competitors’ paid social media campaigns.
Email marketing competition analysis: subject, content and timing
When it comes to email marketing, competitive analysis is crucial to understand how your competitors structure their email communications and what tactics they use. Here are some relevant areas to analyse:
Subject lines and call-to-actions: Examine the subject lines of your competitors’ emails. What kind of incentives or urgency is used in the subject lines? This can help you optimise your own subject lines to increase open rates.
Email content and design: Pay attention to how your competitors design their emails. What type of content do they offer? Do they use images, videos or just text? What are the most important CTAs? This will give you valuable information on how you can make your own emails more attractive.
Frequency and timing: Pay attention to how often and at what times your competitors send emails.
Content marketing competition comparison: topics and formats
Content marketing is a long-term strategy in which the quality and relevance of the content are crucial. A competitive analysis in content marketing helps you to improve your own strategy and create targeted content that appeals to your target group. The most important factors include
Content formats: Investigate which formats (blogs, whitepapers, e-books, videos) your competitors are using and which perform best. This will help you to diversify your own content strategies and create targeted content that resonates well with your target group.
Topics and keywords: What topics do your competitors cover? Which keywords do they use? This gives you valuable information about possible content gaps and helps you to find specific topics that have not yet been sufficiently covered.
Content distribution: Pay attention to which channels your competitors use to distribute their content. Do they use social media, email marketing or influencer collaborations? This information will help you to optimise your own content distribution.
Digital tools for modern competitor analysis
Digital tools offer valuable support by providing detailed insights into your competitors’ strategies and tactics.
In this section, we present a selection of the most common and effective tools for analysing the competition. This is just a small but powerful selection of tools that can help you increase your competitiveness.
You can view competitors' paid ads in the Transparency Centre. This function is particularly useful for understanding which advertising strategies and campaigns your competitors are using.
SEMrush provides comprehensive analyses for SEO, SEA and social media by giving you insights into your competitors' rankings, keywords, backlinks and paid ads.
Ahrefs is another leading tool that specialises in the analysis of SEO and backlinks and provides comprehensive data on search engine optimisation and content marketing.
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that helps companies and social media managers to organise and optimise their social media activities.
The Google Ads Keyword Planner is a free tool from Google that is mainly used for search engine advertising (SEA), but also for SEO keyword research.
SISTRIX offers particularly valuable insights into SEO performance, but it also offers useful functions for paid ads and social media.
Summary: Competition analysis
An effective competitive comparison is the key to taking your online marketing to the next level. Many companies focus exclusively on their own strategies without analysing what makes the competition successful – and this is precisely where a great opportunity lies. Through a targeted competitive analysis, you can identify untapped potential, optimise your marketing measures and gain visibility more quickly.
Whether SEO, SEA or social media – if you understand how your competitors are positioning themselves, you can make informed decisions and develop better strategies. With tools such as SISTRIX, SEMrush or Ahrefs, you can find out which keywords your competitors are ranking for and where you can capitalise on gaps. The Google Ads Keyword Planner and the Transparency Centre show you which ads other companies are running and which messages work in your industry. And social media analysis tools such as Hootsuite give you valuable insights into posting frequency, engagement rates and your competitors’ most successful content.
But data alone is useless – it’s how you use it that counts. By drawing the right conclusions from competitor analysis, you can optimise your content in a targeted manner, use your advertising budget more efficiently and make your brand more visible. Those who analyse smarter grow faster.
Frequently Asked Questions
Questions & answers on analysing the competition
You can find competitors via search engines (Google, Bing) using relevant keywords that you are also targeting. Tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs or Sistrix can help you identify competitors in your industry and niche and analyse their performance.
The competitive comparison should be carried out regularly, ideally every 3 to 6 months. It is important to continuously identify new trends and ensure that you are not lagging behind your competitors.
Yes, a competitive comparison is also very useful on social media. You can see which content is getting the most engagement from your competitors, which hashtags are being used and how their adverts are performing. This helps you to optimise your own social media strategy.
By comparing your keyword rankings with those of your competitors, you can discover unused keywords that are valuable for your business. You will also recognise which SEO strategies are working well for your competitors and can integrate these into your own strategy.
While the competitive comparison focuses on the direct competition and analyses their strategies, a market analysis refers to the entire market environment, including trends, target groups and general market development. Both are important, but the competitive comparison helps you to gain precise and actionable insights for your company.
