Creating an effective marketing strategy isn’t only about creativity. It’s about research.

Scrutinizing your competitors’ business models, from the high-level marketing strategy to the small details, helps you understand what works for them, what tactics you should avoid, and how you can position yourself to stand out among the competition.

Research shows that among companies with fast growth rates, 67% conduct competitor research at least quarterly. That figure is 20% higher than in slow-growing companies.

This guide will walk you through the techniques for competitor analysis across several business areas and help you create an approach suitable for your industry and business.

What is a Competitive Analysis

Competitive analysis is the process of identifying your company’s competitors and comparing your organization across multiple business areas. Typically, you focus on market share, product positioning, growth strategy, or marketing tactics.

As you compare your business to competitors, you’re analyzing your respective strengths and weaknesses as well as differences in business offers.

What to Include in a Competitive Analysis

The scope of any competitive analysis project depends on the goals you want to achieve by gaining the insights. It can be as narrow as comparing backlinks with your competitors to improve SEO, and as broad as comparing business development approaches to improve strategic positioning.

In a comprehensive competitive analysis, you would compare:

• Target markets.
• Market share estimates.
• Products and services.
• Pricing.
• Sales figures estimates.
• Marketing strategy.
• Branding.
• Reputation.

Comparing this list of items between yours and competing brands will help you understand where your brand stands in the competitive landscape and assist you in making informed decisions on development and growth.

Main Techniques for Competitor Analysis in 2025

Use these eight techniques for competitor analysis to form a better understanding of your business compared to competing ones.

Identifying Key Competitors

The first thing you should do is create a list of competitors to compare your business to. Here’s how to identify direct competitors. They are the businesses that fit every point below:

• Sells similar products or services.
• Solves a similar pain point.
• Markets to a similar audience.
• Markets in similar channels.

These essentially are selling the same things to the same people as you. They deserve the most attention in any competitive analysis framework.

The ones that only fit a few are your indirect competition. For instance, if your agency creates websites for small businesses, website builder platforms are your indirect competition. The choice of including them in the research is up to you.

You can find competitor websites using several techniques.

• Do a Google search for your main keyword and comb through the top 100 results.
• Do Google searches for relevant informational keywords. This might show more indirect competition.
• Browse articles that list the best companies in an industry.
• Browse software marketplaces and review websites like G2, TrustRadius, or Capterra.
• Use SEO tools to find competitors based on traffic insights. Software like the Competitor Analysis Tool by SE Ranking can show you a list of domains that rank for the keywords as yours without having to go through Google search results manually.

After using these techniques for competitor analysis, you’ll end up with a long list of websites. How many to include in your analysis depends on how comprehensive you want it to be and how much time you can dedicate to the project.

Defining Your Objectives and Goals

Define the goals of your competitor analysis to narrow down the list of businesses you’re going to analyze and the scope of your analysis.

You can pursue competitor analytics for several reasons:

• Form an understanding of the competitive landscape.
• Create unique brand positioning.
• Update a pricing strategy.
• Research marketing trends.
• Identify market gaps.

Depending on what goals you pursue, you’ll be choosing different sets of competitors (and looking at them from different perspectives).

For instance, if you want to create a competitive pricing strategy, you’d be looking at your direct competitors and comparing their pricing models and relations between services offered and their prices.

If you were looking to update your marketing strategy, you’d be looking at a longer list of competitors and comparing their marketing efforts across multiple channels.

Product Features and Pricing

Once you’ve compiled a list of competitors and narrowed it down to fit your goals… you can start analyzing them. One of the most common techniques is comparing products and pricing across the competitor list.

For producers and retailers, look at:

• Number of products.
• Types of products.
• Product features.
• Product quality.
• Price.
• Warranties.

When it comes to physical products, you’ll be looking at both companies that produce them and at resellers. It makes sense to look at them (separately) and judge different factors.

For service businesses, look at:

• Features offered.
• Quality of services.
• Product positioning.
• Pricing models

The pricing models differ from company to company. You’ll typically see one of these at service businesses:

• Monthly retainer.
• Packages.
• Pricing per hour.
• Pricing per deliverable.
• Custom pricing per project.

In SaaS businesses, you’ll typically find pricing models like monthly payment tiers, add-ons, or usage credits.

Evaluate Competitors’ Marketing Strategies

You can only make projections about your competitors’ internal affairs and the effectiveness of their approaches. Analyzing marketing strategy allows you to work with a lot more information because most of it is readily accessible online or through specialized tools.

There are several areas you can analyze.

• Brand voice. Read through competitor messaging across multiple platforms and analyze what they try to sound like. You can put their branded texts into an LLM like ChatGPT and ask it to characterize their brand voice.
• Digital PR. Find where your competitors are mentioned online and what those PR materials say about them. You can find them by using a -site: search operator in Google search like this:

-site:competitorbrand.com Competitor Brand

This will show you all mentions of the competitor brand that do not come from their website.

• LLM visibility. You can gauge how many mentions your competitors receive in LLM search, such as in Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, or ChatGPT, with specialized tools.
• Email Marketing. Subscribe to your competitors’ newsletters to see how they communicate with customers. This won’t give you a full picture of their email marketing efforts, but you can analyze the top-of-the-funnel approach.
• Paid Advertising. Use tools that show you how your competitors advertise on Google and social media platforms. Look at the keywords they target, target demographics, and ad copy and creatives. 
• Social media presence. Look at social media profiles of your competitors and note which platforms they use, what type of content they create, and what their brand positioning is (on social media). You can also analyze how they interact with customers in the comment section and what influencers they work with.
• Strategic partnerships. Analyze how your competitors partner with each other and other companies. This can help you figure out your own partnership plan.

A couple of marketing analysis techniques require a deeper explanation.

Reviewing Competitor Content

As 82% of companies do content marketing, it makes sense to review this marketing strategy with more scrutiny.

When looking at long-form content, analyze these factors:

• Keywords are the content targets.
• Content categories.
• Topics that the content covers.
• Popular content formats
• Quality and characteristics of content.
• User acquisition strategies.

The last point is crucial as it shows how competitors try to convert blog readers. There are multiple variations of CTAs in content. The most popular ones are an email capture form for a newsletter subscription or a contact form at the bottom of the page.

You can also see a CTA on the sidebar.

Source: ColorWhistle.com

Or within content.

Source: One.com

In short-form social media content, look at:

• Forms of content.
• Stylistics of the text.
• Engagement metrics.
• Calls to action.

In video content, focus on:

• Topics covered in videos.
• Types of videos produced.
• Tone of voice.
• Production quality.
• Conversion techniques.

(Your competitors can leave links to landing pages or soft conversion CTAs in the video description.)

Perform SEO Analysis

You’ll need to use an SEO analytics tool to access and analyze competitor data across several categories.

• Keyword analysis. View what keywords your competitors target in their SEO efforts. This can help you understand their overall strategy for attracting organic traffic and add more keywords to your strategy.
• On-page SEO. Analyzing how competitors use keywords on the page and how they write meta tags helps you improve your optimization strategy. Cross-reference with traffic growth metrics to verify their approach works.
• Technical SEO. Assessing competing websites’ health can help you understand what you should do in this area to rank higher, especially if your competitors outrank you in important keywords.
• Backlink profile. Analyzing what websites link to your competitors can inform your own link-building strategy and help you gain insight into how they build mentions online. This information can also help you with reputation analysis.

Customer Feedback & Reputation Analysis

You can find out what customers say about your competitors with multiple methods:

• Check their Google Business Profile reviews.
• Check their profiles on popular review sites in your industry.
• Check articles with reviews of the competitor.
• Look up competitor mentions on social media.

Information you can find in customer reviews can help you understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. It’s helpful for creating a unique brand positioning that addresses the pain points customers describe. You can then implement it in both product development and ad copy.

Conduct a SWOT Analysis

After going through all the stages of competitor analytics… you have enough data to create a SWOT analysis of your business.

(You can do a quick analysis of competitor strengths and weaknesses before analyzing your own business.) This can help you have a more informed understanding of your own strengths and weaknesses compared to the competition.

There are four elements in SWOT analysis.

• Strengths. What your company does best. This can mean having a unique product feature, a loyal customer base from being an established business for a long time, or an innovative approach to marketing.
• Weaknesses. What your company does poorly. This can mean worse quality of product or service than other competitors, or a lack of investment in a particular marketing.
• Opportunities. What you can leverage to grow. This can mean introducing new features or improving your product to match customer pain points, or strategically enhancing your investment in a particular marketing channel.
• Threats. What can prevent you from achieving your goals? This can be quite broad, from a change in marketing trends to a lack of knowledge and resources that might prevent you from implementing growth opportunities.

Use the SWOT analysis to improve your branding, product, and marketing.

To Summarize:

Competitor analysis can help you learn where your company stands in comparison to peers, create a strategy to differentiate yourself, and add new pricing or marketing strategies to your toolset. 

It’s not something you only do once. Run narrow analytics when you need to form or update one aspect of your product or growth strategy. Run a broad competitor analysis quarterly… and your company will have time to react to changes in business trends and competitor landscape.