November 30, 2020
Make your current or website-in-the works battle-ready by sending out the hounds to gather competitive information.
We all want to think of our website as the center of the universe, but there's an awful lot of space junk out there affecting its performance — social media, digital advertising, search marketing. So, it's essential to take that environment into account when concocting a new direction for your content, focusing your SEO on key terms that drive traffic, or laying a course for a redesign.
This information will help you understand your competition, how they compete, and develop new ideas for strategy.
We usually key-in on the three-to-five websites that exert the most gravitational pull on your in any given medical category or market.
Where to start your digital sleuthing
Start by checking how popular each site is in the grand scheme of all websites (Alexa). Spend time on the sites; note intriguing features, the information they gathered on forms, the site's load speed (Pingdom), and the scope of content and its flavor.
Learn how your competition executes on social media. Visit all of their social platforms, including YouTube, to assess what content their audience engages in, how often they post, and what audience they're retargeting. Do you want to compete with them head-on, develop a different strategy, or kick back and drink a cold one?
Use this information to determine how your social media efforts stack-up, potential new platforms to explore, and tactics that may be working or not working for your gaggle of competitors.
Next – critical – find out which keywords you share with competitors and how you rank against them. An SEO application for this, like Moz, SEO Book, or SERankings, will make quick work of this analysis! This information is gold for directing content creation and ensuring that you're ranking for keywords that serve as your breadcrumbs to conversion. Most SEO tools can also elicit what your competitors are spending on search marketing.
We've found that this approach works equally well for the family physician as the medical device company that wants to position a new product.
Please send us a note to learn more about our approach to digital competitive analysis.