Research, investigation, insights and analysis of the market and competitors is a business service, which helps to develop a plan and a strategy to promote your business and company (incl. startups) in the web (Internet) as a competitive company. It can cover different aspects of a business – design and branding, website presentation, Internet advertising and SEO optimization, and more.
A research and analisys helps to make conclusions about the structure of site content, to choose web design scheme and interactive effects. It’s very useful for startups, because they can analyze what the competition offer and plan (develop a strategy) accordingly to catch up with them. You can get ideas where to advertise and include that in your marketing strategy plan. You can get ideas about search engines optimization (SEO), so you can make a strong SEO planning for multiple months ahead and *leave behind the competition (* if they do nothing in these months).
Website planning – web design and conversions
When you are planning to develop a new website (either your first site or to replace the existing one), which advertises your services or products, you really need to know what the competition offers, and how their services and products are represented. Why? Because even if you pay to receive visitors (Google Ads marketing campaign), you still need to build and earn their trust and convert them to customers/clients. Unfortunately, you usually can’t pay for clients/customers directly as part of your advertising, even if it cost 20x or 50x more per customer, instead of per click.
Usually a client checks multiple companies (multiple websites), checks where they are located, what are the prices (if published) and decides which company to contact. If your competitors’ websites have stylish web design and provide better UX (user experience) than yours website – you would be losing potential customers/clients, by letting them go to the competitors. If you have a paid campaign, that also means direct financial losses, because you are usually paying per click (PPC), but even these visitors would choose better UX design and your conversion rate would lower.
If you (or we, as a more experienced in some business fields) do the research, we can avoid such mistakes…, but also there are exceptions…
Sometimes, the competition could be very strong – they could have millions (M) and they could invest 1-2M for a great website and user experience, branding, marketing strategy and so on. Most likely you can’t compete with them, so don’t expect miracles. When we are planning, we compete to the real competitors, that could be competed in a few months or 1-3 years. If their websites have weaknesses we would exploit that – we’ll represent your company better that their presentation, thus you can expect better conversions (more visitors would convert to clients and contact you with questions/orders)!
SEO optimization strategy by research and analysis of the competitors
The research and analysis of the competitors’ websites is really great for SEO optimization strategy purposes. We put the SEO after website planning and web design, because the conversions depend on the web design, so we start planning in reversed order – from the final action (the conversion). The SEO optimization goal is to drive high targeted traffic to your website – that is the previous step, before the conversion.
When we investigate the SEO methods and the SEO optimization level for different competitors, the idea is very simple – to catch up with the competitors, by making the same (or similar) actions. We also would need few months (depends on the competition in your business field) for measurable results and we may also need to take few more extra steps to jump over the competitors and surpass them in the search results.
However, if we don’t make investigation and analysis of competition, we don’t know what competitors have and what is needed to surpass them. This results in inability to estimate the actual time period for SEO optimisation of a website, neither exact price for the whole SEO process.
What we can do without analysis of the competitors is to implement some common SEO optimisation activities, which would result in higher rankings, then depending on the progress we can make decision for the next optimisation steps. That could be ineffective though.
Other benefits of market and competitors research, investigation and analysis
There are a lot more benefits by doing of competitors research and different people would notice different things. For example, Let’s get our web development business