6 Insights You Can Gain From the Top Pages of Your Competitors No matter what type of business you are running, you can get valuable insights just by analyzing your competitor's top website pages.
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No matter what type of business you are running or where it is located, you will have some fierce competition.
Although the situation might sometimes look tough, keep in mind that having other, more experienced businesses compete against you is not always bad. You can get valuable insights just by analyzing their top webpages. They, much like you, desperately needed new customers some time ago, and they found a way to attract them. And you can gain the knowledge on how to achieve success straight from their web pages.
That said, here are the six most important insights you can gain from your competitor's top web pages. This info might be crucial to running a business successfully, so always try to gather as much as you can.
1. Top products and services
You should always try to understand what sort of products were successful for your top opponents. Try to learn what sells the most, what sells mediocre, and what doesn't sell at all; analyze what sort of mistakes your competitors made and then learn from them. Either try to offer similar (but better) products or focus on not escalating the competition by offering something special and unique only to you.
For example, if you are trying to sell some courses or webinars, find out what knowledge is currently trending. Are you also capable of providing high-quality, educational, paid video content? Then, by all means, try to outclass your competitors (don't forget that to get any sort of attention for your webpage, it needs to be properly SEO optimized.) Otherwise, focus on the niche, yet fastest-growing course ideas. If you have the knowledge and some natural talent, you might be the one referred to as an expert on the matter in a few years.
Related: 5 Ways to Differentiate Your Products and Services in an Oversaturated Market
2. Number of your competitor's customers
By analyzing your competition's website, you can also get informed on how many customers they have. Try searching for pages ending on "pay", "trial" or "free trial". Don't trust what your competitors say themselves, as it is pretty much guaranteed that they inflated the number of the clients they work with to make themselves look more trustworthy and professional.
You can use any well-received traffic analysis tool to get the results. A high-quality analysis tool will categorize the traffic in a variety of ways. For example, you will be informed on how many unique page visits and page views were recorded and be briefed on whether this traffic comes directly from within the website, from a search engine or from social media. You will also see how many page views and visits your competitor straight out paid for.
3. Top blog and media content
It doesn't matter what type of business you run in today's times — you should also create an accompanying blog. It will help you keep your users interested in your newest offers if you manage to use the rules of SEO to your advantage. And this is precisely why you should focus on analyzing the types of content your competitors are offering on their blogs and media platforms before starting your own. This will tell you exactly what your potential customers are looking for and what you should write about.
Pay attention to the list of top pages on your competitor's blog and see what type of posts they share on social media. Note which communications channels they use the most and which ones they use the least. Pay attention to what kinds of posts they share regularly and which topics show up occasionally (e.g., during the Christmas season). This will help you in planning a successful campaign on your own.
Use a traffic analysis tool to search for the blog-related URLs in the Top Pages list. Analyze their unique page views and visits, conversions, traffic sources — count every single bit of info the tool is giving you as necessary. Launching a successful blog might just be the key to success. There's quite a strong possibility that many of your visitors will stick with you thanks to the high-quality, informational content you are producing, rather than just because of your currently ongoing special deals.
Related: Why Every Brand Should Have a Blog
4. Most critical regional markets and languages
It is always a good idea to check which of your competitor's top pages are popular in a given country or region. Regional markets can be pretty different from each other, so it's essential to do this every time you plan on an expansion. Likewise, if a localized page is noted on the Top Pages list, that means a given region or country is very important to your opponent's business and can turn out to be a great source of customers for you too.
First, learn the numbers of unique visitors a given regional page receives, then try to estimate how big your competitor's total audience is in that given region. You can also check which traffic sources your competition used to gather as many potential customers as possible. Remember that, thanks to traffic analysis tools, you can learn all sorts of data individually for each country.
5. Marketing campaign focus
By digging a little bit deeper, you will find and understand the main topics of interest of your competition's marketing campaigns. Try and see if you can, for example, group-specific URLs into categories or analyze the distribution of trends over time. Suppose you can tell that many different product pages of the same type have recorded unusual spikes in customer interest over a short period. In that case, this might very well mean the store was promoting that category quite heavily over said time.
Learning your opponent's marketing campaign focus will help you in managing your own. By using traffic tools, you can quickly tell which campaigns were the most successful ones (as they attracted most users to the product page). Using this very same method, you can analyze companies offering several types of service. By comparing the clusters of same-type top carriers, you will learn which of these services are your competitor's most potent selling points.
6. Lead-generating landing pages
Another piece of information you can gain from the Top Pages list is what landing pages grant your competitor the most significant amount of leads. Keep in mind that the Top Pages list ranks even the landing pages hidden from the Google Web Search engine, which are made specifically for some pay-per-click campaigns. Why should you visit such pages, you may ask?
Because you can learn from them, take their general appearance under consideration. Note how structured and designed they are; check all sorts of SEO metrics. Doing this research gathers the basic yet important do's and don'ts of successfully launching your website. You can then use this knowledge in your campaigns.
When you're trying to make a name out of your own business in the market, that entire market is your learning source, including your competitors. The insights mentioned above are a great way to structure and organize your path to success.
Related: How to Write Landing Page Copy That Connects With Your Customer
