Evaluate Your Product: 8 Competitive Analysis Steps

As a small business owner you wear many hats — and one of them is watching the competition. Competitive analysis is simply the discipline of determining the strengths and weaknesses of the competitors in your market so you can build strategies with a distinct advantage. Your competitors have already spent real money learning what works. Learn from their spending instead of repeating it.

The 8 steps to find your competitive edge

• Review your top three competitors' websites — homepage and sales pages. Do they work? Why?
• Look at how they sell: paid ads, social, or organic traffic? That mix tells you where the money flows.
• Ask the blunt question: are you better than the rest? What genuinely sets you apart online?
• Study what kind of website they run and how they use it — brochure, machine, or museum.
• Compare how you educate and inform customers — blog, email, social — and how well it works.
• Hone in on your value-added difference: the thing you offer the others don't.
• Watch how the competition uses content to build domain authority — then do it better.
• Check their links and citations, and build authority from the same worthwhile sources.

Why this works

Look at what competitors do right and wrong, and you skip years of trial and error. Build your online strategy around the tactics already proving themselves in your market — website, ads, content — then differentiate where they're weak. That's how you gain market share quickly without out-spending anyone.