How to Spy on Your Competitors: Where They Get Traffic, How They Do SEO, How They Spend Money and More

Listening startups pitches, investors sooner or later will ask a question about the competitors. And woe to the startup, which didn’t think of those which he would have to fight with on the market. Especially if the niche is growing rapidly and attracts a lot of teams. In this article, let’s talk about the methods and tools that can help you understand who you are going to compete with.

General information about the competitor’s website

An analysis of any market starts with the determination of the existing competitors. To do this, just type a few keywords in the search engine, and you will get at least the top players in your niche.

Next, using SimilarWeb, we get the basic information:

• The amount of traffic per month (Total Visits);
• The time that a person spends on the site per session (Avg Visit Duration.);
• Number of viewed pages (Pages per Visit);
• How many people left the site immediately (Bounce Rate);
• The overall traffic dynamics with % of incidence (rate) for the last month;
• Traffic distribution by countries;
• Traffic Sources (Direct, Referrals, Search, Social, Mail);
• Detailed traffic from social networks (Facebook, YouTube and so on);
• Keyword Analysis, and possible links to other websites (although for this task, it’s better to use another resource — Serpstat, which much better defines the semantics and the competitors).

These numbers themselves say little, but comparing to competitors on the market can reveal a lot. For example, is the 5.30% drop of traffic good or bad?

Imagine you owe the online store selling schoolbooks. It’s not a surprise that its traffic falls before holidays. Check out the rest of the players on your niche, perhaps they fell harder. If it’s so, you’re moving in the right direction. Or visa versa.

According to Pages per Visit and Bounce Rate, you can determine the relative quality of the competitor’s traffic. For example, if his total traffic is growing, but at the same time his Bounce Rate is significantly increasing, and Pages per Visit is falling, then the more likely he is getting a lot of low-quality traffic.

Traffic Sources also can say a lot. For example, if your competitor had a rapid growth of traffic, you can determine its source and understand how it had been caused. It’s important for marketing strategy building.

Detailed analysis of the site

Basic SEO-parameters analysis of competitors is a crucial stage. It helps to reveal the following:

• The number of organic keywords and their dynamics (Serpstat);

• Trust rate (relative analyzer parameter, which allows determining search engines ‘attitude’ to the site (quality and age of the inbound and outbound links);
• The number of referring domains and pages;

• CPC for the selected keywords.

These numbers together, and in comparison with all market players give an understanding of the complexity and the competition level of the chosen market in general and the “strength” of each player in the search results individually. For example, knowing the number of backlinks to a particular resource, the number of keywords in the search results and the approximate price per click, you can also calculate your CAC (cost of attracting a new customer) to attract customers with the help of paid ads and the approximate cost of SEO. Comparing them with your lifetime value (LTV), you will understand how your unit economics works at this market.

If you are steep at SEO and just these indicators don’t satisfy you, you can get a lot of other information with the help of Serpstat:

• Complete semantic core with the dynamics for each keyword;
• All ads: text, format, cost;
• A detailed analysis of the reference base.

How to find general information about the competitor

Start with searching of competitors pages in social networks and subscribe them to be constantly up to date with all the news. Companies usually write about their key changes or events.

Further, on CrunchBase you can check the investment status of the company — whether money was involved and, if so, when, how much, who invested.

Also, an interesting analysis tool is f6s.com. Companies there often expose their real key metrics (traffic, income, and so on), and you can follow their dynamics.

Quite a lot of information about the financial performance, strategic plans, and key KPI can be found by reading the most available online articles about the company, interview with the founders and their personal blogs. But it is generally applicable to the sufficiently large projects. For small ones, to find such information, particularly financial figures, is quite difficult.

The bottom line

I hope that this information will be useful to those who are just starting online projects and has little experience and, especially, money to analyze future competitors. If you know some other useful tools and methods, please feel free to contribute. :)