Competitor analysis.

Why keep an eye on competitors

Not in order to copy. The point is different: to understand how the market you have entered is structured and where the free space in it is.

Competitors have already spent money testing hypotheses. Some things work for them, some do not, and part of those conclusions is visible from outside — from which services stayed on the website and which disappeared, what they advertise for months and what they showed for a week and took down.

The second point is not to fall behind. If the whole niche has moved to clear prices on the website and you still have “price on request”, you are losing enquiries without even knowing it.

Who counts as a competitor

The list is not compiled by gut feeling. There are three different groups, and they should not be confused.

Direct competitors — those who sell the same thing to the same audience. These are the ones you run into during negotiations.

Search competitors — those who hold the top positions for your queries. These can be aggregators, marketplaces and information sites that do not sell your service at all but take away attention.

Indirect competitors — those who solve the same customer problem in a different way. They are useful to know because it is they who explain why a deal did not happen.

Five to seven companies are enough to start with. Any more, and the analysis will never end.

What exactly to look at

• Offer and prices — what the service includes, how it is packaged, whether the price is shown and in what form.
• Website — structure, the set of pages, how the path to an enquiry is built, which forms and which promises.
• Content — what they write about, in what format, what gets a response.
• Advertising and platforms — where they are present constantly, which promotions they repeat.
• Customer reviews — what people complain about and what they praise.

The last point gives the most. Other people's reviews are free research into the pain points of your shared audience. A recurring complaint about a competitor is a ready-made wording for your advantage, if you genuinely do things differently.

What to do it with

Half of the work is done by hand and for free: open competitors' websites, walk the customer's path all the way to the enquiry form, subscribe to their mailing list and platforms, read the reviews on maps and review sites, look at the search results for your key queries.

Among tools, search visibility and keyword research services come in handy — they show which words competitors are collecting traffic on and which topics you are not covering. The specific service does not matter much; what matters is using the same one, so that the figures can be compared with each other.

An important caveat: data from external services about someone else's traffic is an estimate. It is fine for “more or less” comparisons but not as exact figures.

How to turn it into decisions

Collecting information is useless in itself. The result of the analysis should be a short list of decisions.

A convenient format is to sort the findings into four parts: where you are objectively stronger, where you are weaker, what you can take as an opportunity and what threatens you. The first two produce positioning, the second two produce a work plan.

The main conclusion the whole exercise is for is how you differ. If after analysing five competitors you cannot name your difference in one sentence, then you do not have one yet, and that matters more than any tactical tweaks.

Separately, write down what nobody in the niche does. The free space is usually found exactly there, not in trying to do the same thing slightly better.

How often to do it

A full analysis — once every six months or when there are noticeable changes: launching a new line of business, a drop in enquiries, a major player entering the market.

Between full analyses, observation is enough: follow competitors' platforms and check the search results for your main queries once a month. It takes half an hour and means you do not miss changes.

Frequently asked questions

Won't this turn into copying?

It will, if you take other people's solutions without asking “why did they do it that way”. Copying is dangerous because you adopt the consequence of someone else's strategy without knowing the strategy itself.

What to do if a competitor is cheaper?

Do not cut your price reflexively. First understand what makes them cheaper: a smaller scope of work, a different segment, dumping to enter the market. It often turns out you are selling different things.

Is it worth approaching competitors posing as a customer?

Walking the open customer path — looking at the website, prices, response speed — is normal practice. Misleading people and taking up managers' time for the sake of reconnaissance is bad practice.

How long does the analysis take?

The first one, across five companies — one or two working days if done carefully. Subsequent updates take a few hours.

What to do next

Open the websites of your three closest competitors and get to the enquiry form on each, timing it and noting what got in the way. Compare with your own website — this hour usually gives more than a week of strategy discussions.

We analyse the niche and build the website structure around demand — that is SEO promotion. Next, these guides will come in handy: how to create a company brand and how to put together a content strategy.