TL;DR

MMC Digital’s Competitor Analysis Service helps you to improve market share and performance by dissecting the digital strategies of actual competitors. We address key pain points like search performance, keyword gaps, tone-of-voice and positioning differences, and much more besides to help you grow your brand.

We offer two main approaches:

• Search and discovery analysis: focused on top online competitors, covering technical SEO, keyword/content performance, site UX/UI, and core web vitals.
• Vertical analysis: a more comprehensive audit of your top competitors, adding assessments of brand messaging, positioning, and overall industry fit.

Our research aims to help businesses grow traffic, identify new revenue sources, improve customer experience, and increase market share – but above all, to unlock your brand’s potential.

Pain points

As brands develop, the challenges of growing within a vertical begin to compound – the cost of finding new customers can increase, the number of competitor brands can grow, and it becomes necessary to look to growing market share in order to push the business forward. One of the best methods of doing this is to make sure you’re competing on at least the same level when it comes to your online presence, and that requires competitor analysis. 

So, if you’re struggling with any of the following, our competitor analysis service may be for you:

• Competitors outranking you for key terms
• Difficulty ranking for new products or new industry terms
• AI platforms recommending your competitors
• Issues winning new customers from search and discovery platforms

What we mean by competitor analysis

The first thing to state here is that who you consider your competition may not actually be who you’re competing against – when we talk about competitor analysis, we’re talking about taking deep dives into the online presences of brands with which you’re actually competing in the SERPs and, more broadly, in search and discovery. 

Though the two may be the same, we’ve found that brands often choose ‘spiritual’ competitors – those brands that you feel a specific likeness with or opposition to, in product or positioning. What we do is identify the brands that are showing up in the searches your customers are making, those that are earning clicks for products or services you provide, and dissect their online activity to understand how you can better compete.

Whether that’s site performance, content, UX and accessibility, links, technical SEO execution, site structure and much more, we examine every aspect of their online activity to understand where and how they are outperforming you and what you can do to close the gap.

MMC Digital’s competitor analysis service

We have two approaches we can take to competitor analysis for your brand. We can look at direct competition, looking to identify immediate improvements you can make to your online presence in order to gain ground or maintain a competitive advantage online. We can also take a broader approach, and investigate your vertical more broadly – to give you not just the information you need to make progress online, but also insight into your place in the sector as a whole, with analysis of your positioning, communication and more. 

Search and discovery competitor analysis

Our search and discovery competitor analysis establishes the top five online competitors for your brand – businesses with which you share a significant number of target keywords, products and services. We then look to analyse:

• Core web vitals performance
• Site UX/UI and accessibility
• Keyword and content performance
• Link profiles
• Technical SEO performance
• Crawl performance and indexability
• Local SEO performance

Vertical competitor analysis

Our vertical analysis expands the selection of competitors to ten, but also expands beyond traditional digital marketing metrics to also include aspects of more traditional marketing. The vertical analysis includes everything in the search and discovery competitor analysis, but also includes the following:

• Messaging – how your site’s tone of voice and communication style compares with competitors across all varieties of on and off-site content, and how well this is likely to land with your stated ICP.
• Brand – how your brand fits within the broader industry vertical in terms of various brand signals (from a design perspective, but also in terms of industry certifications, trust signals and more).
• Positioning – how well your brand’s position fits within or contrasts with industry standards, how clear your USPs are compared to your competition, and how this is likely to be interpreted by your ICP.

What can our competitor analysis service do for your business?

The impact of a competitor analysis will largely depend on the stage of development your business has reached – for new and challenger brands, it’s about shedding light on the work that’s being done by established players that can potentially be replicated, and identifying gaps that can be exploited.

For established brands, it’s about looking for growth opportunities, keyword gaps, performance differences and ways that you can grow your market share by closing gaps in your approach.

Our competitor analysis service provides you with a research document that facilitates:

• Growing traffic
• Identifying new sources of revenue
• Better understanding of market position and fit
• Improving profitability
• Improving customer experience and retention
• Increasing market share