Three Good Reasons To Spy On Your Competitors

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In this opinion piece, SEMrush global head of marketing Olga Andrienko (pictured below) explores strategies for standing out from other competitors in the market.

Olga Andrienko

It is relatively easy to start a business these days, really all you need is a website and a way of receiving payments and you can be trading in under an hour.

As a result, the competition online has never been greater. So, if you don’t have a strategy for standing out based on solid competitive research, you risk falling behind in today’s saturated digital environment.

That’s why spying on your competitors is so essential to survival these days and what I am suggesting is neither frowned upon nor illegal.

But what can and probably will go wrong if you don’t pay close attention to your competitors? And, what are some of the strategies you can employ to overcome these challenges?

Hostile encirclement

You can only really be prepared if you are aware.

No business operates in vacuum, so be sure that you know everything about all the key players in the market, and use special tools to help you analyse them efficiently.

When an environment becomes familiar and you know what to expect, you have nothing to be scared of.

Learning about your competitors and the key tactics they use provides a great opportunity for effective planning and tracking of results.

Ideas struggle

Content is still king, and developing the content pieces that resonate with your target audience remains one of the biggest challenges for a marketer today.

If you are short on ideas, try spying on your competitors: you will not only find some new topics for your content marketing, but you will also understand how to improve what you put out there.

But the challenge of finding good content does not always relate to generating ideas and topics for your pages.

Often, it’s about finding quality sources to feed into your content development process: planning, creation, automation and distribution.

The recent research by the Content Marketing Institute and SEMrush tells how to set up a content development workflow and avoid problems at each stage.

Missed opportunities

Doing business and especially planning marketing campaigns on a daily basis makes you think you know literally everything about it: all call to actions, keywords, possible phrases and the limitations.

But if competitor’s keywords, traffic and advertising efforts are something more or less obvious, it would be great to research the relationships your competitors have established with opinion leaders, bloggers, media outlets and other websites.

And you definitely can do that.

This sort of data will help you determine the possible partnerships for backlinks, PR and even your affiliate program.

Putting off proper competitive research is a huge mistake.

As the strategies I have mentioned prove, you can easily get all the insights that will help you get your business to the next level.

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