Tips for Competitor Research

By Adam  |  24 Oct 2016 12:00:00

If you want to start an eCommerce website (or any kind of business, really) then you're going to have to get an idea of what else is already out there. You've got your very own range of hand sculpted wine glasses? Great! Now who else is selling that kind of thing? How can you do a better job than them? In today's blog post I would like to give you some tips for an easy bit of competitor research.

Search for Key Search Terms and Visit the Sites

If we follow on from the idea that you are selling hand sculpted wine glasses, then that exact phrase will be something to write into a search engine (as well as lots of other variations.) If you look through the different sites that come up on page 1, you'll get an idea of what your up against. What kind of prices do they have? What kind of ethos is there to the business? How good does the site look? How could any of these things be better? The answers to that last question are what you will keep in mind when making your own site.

Check Out Their Social Media

When looking at the site of a competitor, it would also be worth your time to look at their social media pages. This will give you a good idea of how they market themselves and how they interact with their customers. There are a lot of things you can learn from a business's social media pages (e.g. about flash sales and giveaways) which you won't find out from their site alone.

Read Customer Feedback

Be it reviews of competitors or comments on blog posts or social media pages, the feedback that customers have given your competitors is very valuable to you. If you can see what their customers (who are your prospects) are asking for, you know what to deliver. You see that the people are crying out for them to offer actual wine (and cheese too) to go along with the wine glasses they sell? That's exactly what you should be offering!

Find Out What Competitors are Ranking For

This is a little harder as you may need to pay a service for this, but using tools like SEMrush you can find out what search terms your competitors are ranking for. Once you have this information in mind, you can do two things. Firstly, you can try to target these very same keywords as you know that people are searching for them, or you can target the words that they are not ranking for, but which you can see get searched for.
 

So I hope those tips will come in handy for anybody who is planning to start an eCommerce website soon, or even anybody who already has one but hasn't taken much of a look at their competitors. If you are planning on starting an eCommerce website, then you've come to the right place as you can use Sellr to create one for no cost at all!