Competition with big brands for small businesses is tough, especially in days when digital presence and visibility are mission essential. Also, big brands usually have more money to spend on advertising and reaching the market. Nevertheless, with the right strategies and tools small businesses can still find a place for themselves as well as an audience who are relevant and valuable to target. 

A competitor analysis tool is one of the most powerful ways to level the playing field. These tools give small businesses access to insights into competitors’ strategies, so they can learn what’s working in their industry and find opportunities, and even create data driven strategies.

Small businesses can gain a deeper understanding of market trends, traffic sources, audience demographics, and competitor tactics through the platform’s suite of competitive analysis tools it provides such as Similarweb. With this insight, small businesses can create much more targeted marketing, optimize their content, and build a unique brand presence that really connects with the audience. 

If you’re a small business thinking about using competitor analysis tools to compete with bigger brands, here’s a step by step guide.

1. Establish Your Competitors and Set Goals

Step one of competitor analysis is to identify who is your main competitors. Competitors for a small business can be your direct competitors (other businesses doing the same thing for the same people) or your indirect competitors (if there’s a bigger brand out there doing the same thing, life sucks). Having a solid understanding of who your competitors are, you can start to determine how they are strategizing, what their performance looks like, and what their strengths and weaknesses are when it comes to their digital presence.

Run competitor analysis tools such as Similarweb to come up with specific goals you want to achieve. For example, you might want to:

• Know why people visit other companies’ sites.
• See if they are using top keywords and SEO strategies.
• Know which of their most successful social media channels and content types they’d like to replicate.
  By setting objectives, it helps focus you and you can extract relevant data that will help inform your strategies.

2. Look at your Traffic Sources and Marketing Channels

Large brands have one of the biggest advantages — being able to use multiple marketing channels. But if you analyze the traffic sources of your competitors, after some work, you will learn exactly which channels bring the most value and you can invest into these. A competitor analysis tool can reveal the sources of your competitor’s website traffic, such as:

• Direct Traffic: Users directly type the website URL, meaning brand recognition.
• Organic Search: Search engine visitors give insight into effective keywords.
• Social Media: Figuring out what platforms their audience does and doesn’t care much about (traffic from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) :
• Referral Traffic: Drawing visitors from external websites, showing valuable partners or potential content sharing opportunities.

If your competitors are getting a large portion of their traffic from organic search, you might give SEO strategies priority in order for you to also acquire similar traffic. In case social media is a strong source, then building a really strong social media presence with some engaging content may assist in winning your edge.

3. Rerank Posts Keyword and SEO Analysis to Rank Higher

While large brands have a tendency to dominate search engine results pages (SERPs) for competitive keywords, not all is lost for small businesses who can still access the many opportunities such as finding product names using the Product Name Generator. Competitor analysis tools allow you to discover which are your top competitors’ high ranking keywords (that have high search volume and are driving some traffic) or low competition keywords (that are easier to rank for but don’t have the same amount of search volume).

To do that, small businesses must focus on niche keywords, long tail keywords, and location based search terms which will help small businesses to improve their SEO and rank for searches that are relevant to their audience. For example:

• Long-Tail Keywords: The longer, more specific phrases, these are less competitive phrases, but these are also phrases that are highly targeted; such as ‘eco-friendly cleaning services in Mumbai’ vs. ‘cleaning services.’
• Location-Based Keywords: For small businesses that focus on specific places, local SEO is a big deal. As a competitor analysis tool, you can use this method to discover the most commonly used keywords in your region, which increases your opportunity to rank on local searches.

Secondly, to see which content is best for your competitors, use the competitor analysis tool. You then attract traffic and engagement on your site by creating similar content that is specific but tailored to your brand’s unique style.

Final Thoughts

If you’ve got a small business, that means you are competing with the big guys, and if so, you know it’s no easy task. But with the right insights, small businesses still have a chance. Similarweb competitor analysis tools can help you understand what makes competitors strong, what weaknesses you can take advantage of, and where’s a new market opportunity. 

By targeting SEO, utilizing your social media presence, and understanding the value of your pricing strategy, small businesses can utilize data to attract and keep a loyal customer base, even in the often competitive arena of marketing.