The foundation for successful development and promotion of any online project, especially an e-commerce store, is laid at the initial stage — competitor analysis. This step is extremely important for business owners who have already defined their area of activity. Based on the data obtained from competitor analysis, you can build your own promotion strategy aimed at achieving the maximum result expected from the goals you have previously set.
This article will present approaches to building such analysis and suggest tools used for this purpose. However, it is important to note that due to increased competition and your specific goals, you will independently determine which tools and analysis criteria from those proposed suit you best.
1. Defining competitors for analysis
There are two ways to identify competitors:
➤ Create a list of 3–5 of your competitors. They are usually easy to identify through experience. The key is that they should operate in the same field and also be engaged in promotion.
➤ Identify the key players in your market — those who set trends and create the main competition for your website.
In the second case, this can be done in just a few minutes. To do this, gather a pool of key queries you want to promote for, analyze which competitors rank most frequently and highest in the search engine, for example, Google. This way, you will get a list of domains and competitor websites.
For a more detailed analysis of search results by queries, you can use the Serpstat service. Let's consider an example. If you have an online store selling auto products and you sell batteries, identify those who set the tone in this niche — large stores or well-known brands that have the greatest influence on demand and competition. Using the service mentioned above, you get a kind of list of domains with similar topics and a pool of key queries corresponding to yours.
Thanks to this format of presenting information, we can evaluate the list of competitors and identify the top ones for ourselves. Thus, we have determined a list of domains with the best visibility results and the highest number of queries. At this stage, it is worth moving on to the competitors' websites and studying them carefully. Look at how similar they are to your store: what categories they have, what products they sell, and whether there is something you don’t offer. Pay attention to the regions where they operate — all this will help you understand how much they really compete with you.
Such a detailed analysis of competitor sites allows you to immediately exclude those it would not be very reasonable to compete with and identify those with whom you can quite reasonably enter into competitive struggle for traffic and rankings. After the final selection, you should visit each remaining site and see how they present themselves: what they promise their customers, what advantages, promotions, discounts, and bonuses they offer. Notice which part of the market they are trying to occupy and how they try to stand out among others.
2. Choosing the most important parameters for analysis
Determine which parameters are most important to you — these will be the criteria by which you study your competitors. This kind of analysis can be called marketing analysis. It can include the following:
➤ How well does the competitor's site match your niche: what categories and products are offered.
➤ How do they position themselves, what market share do they hold, and in which regions do they operate.
➤ What attracts customers: unique offers, promotions, bonuses, loyalty programs.
➤ General information about the company: what they do, what they value, what mission they declare.
➤ Product description and presentation.
➤ Content: texts, photos, videos — everything that helps with sales.
➤ Interactive features: registration, calculator, personal account, catalog, etc.
➤ Slogans, headlines, calls to action.
➤ Level of service on the website — can be assessed from the perspective of a "mystery shopper": how convenient, fast, and clear it is.
➤ Consistency of the conditions stated on the website with real conditions (payment, delivery, etc.).
➤ Speed of order processing.
➤ Quality of order handling by the manager and their competence.
➤ Website blog (analysis of publication frequency, quality and quantity of articles, topics, blog coverage and traffic, authorship of materials).
➤ Analysis of the social media presence of the competitor (coverage, groups, post frequency and quality).
➤ Reviews about the store, service, and working in the company.
➤ Responsive web design for mobile devices.
➤ Usability analysis of the website — user-friendliness.
➤ Website design.
➤ Trust elements on the site (reviews, recommendations, certificates).
➤ How leads are collected (contact forms, callback services, such as callbackhunter and similar, order forms, online consultations).
➤ Website traffic analysis (e.g., through installed counters).
➤ Search for satellite sites.
➤ Availability of mobile applications (for mobile platforms and social networks).
➤ Availability of subscription and email newsletters.
➤ Presence of email marketing.
➤ Availability of paid publications, media advertising activities, etc.
By gathering the information obtained through such analysis for the previously filtered list of competitors (see section 1), you can determine who lacks what, who accounts for the maximum number of parameters, and identify competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Having this “information cushion,” you can develop your own project promotion strategy.
3. Tools used for analysis
Competitor analysis is an important step in developing an effective SEO strategy. To understand who your competitors are and what you are competing for in search results, it is essential to conduct the research correctly.
📋 Compile a list of competitors
How to gather a pool of competitors and identify the most relevant ones for yourself was covered in the first part of the article. For this, we used the Serpstat service.
🔗 Analysis of external links to the website
For any website, it is important how it is evaluated by search engines. The better the site meets SEO requirements, the higher its chances of reaching the top of search results. One of the key factors is the quantity and quality of backlinks to the site.
To understand how competitors operate, it is worth analyzing how many external links they have and how high-quality these links are. This can be done using services such as Ahrefs or Serpstat. It is useful to identify the strongest backlinks and try to get placements on the same resources.
It is also important to ensure that the number of links to your website is not less than that of your competitors.
Analyzing the backlinks pointing to competitors' websites will help you build an external promotion strategy. This way, you can see how many links lead not only to their site as a whole but also to individual pages. This will give you an understanding of how many links are needed to promote similar pages on your own site.
🗝️ Competitors’ semantic core by domain
Using Serpstat, you can analyze competitors’ semantics — that is, the keywords for which they rank in search results. This will help you find phrases that are not yet present on your site and expand your project’s semantic core.
Check which queries bring users to your competitor and to which specific pages. Then verify: do you have the same pages, and are you using those queries? If not — this is a great opportunity to strengthen your site. Select a couple of competitors from your list to compare missing phrases.
You can also compare competitors’ pages with your own — see which key queries bring users specifically to their pages. By identifying these queries, you can adapt them for your site and carry out additional SEO optimization of the relevant sections.
⏳Age of competitors’ website or pages
You can determine the age of a website and its individual pages using Web.archive. It allows you to see when the site first appeared on the internet and how its pages have changed over time. The Who.is service can help you find out the domain registration date and general information about the owner.
This analysis helps to understand how many years the competitor’s site has been around and whether it has its own history and established reputation. If your site is new, overtaking such a resource will be more difficult — but definitely possible. It will just require more time and effort.
⚡ Website and page load speed
The loading speed of both individual pages and the entire website should be at least as fast as your competitors’—ideally even better. It’s useful to know your competitors’ loading speeds because this gives you a benchmark for optimizing your own site. A helpful tool for this is Google’s own PageSpeed Insights, which can analyze and provide recommendations to improve site speed.
Using this tool, we can evaluate the loading speed of the website or individual pages for both mobile devices and desktop computers. The tool additionally describes the probable causes of slow loading speeds and suggests several solutions.
The website loading speed should be no less than 95% — this is exactly what Google recommends. If the site loads slowly, the bounce rate increases: users simply leave without waiting for the page to load. This means you lose part of your audience. Most likely, next time such a user will choose another site, remembering that yours took too long to load. It is especially important to consider loading speed on mobile devices — nowadays, most traffic comes from them. Mobile users are active and often purchasing customers, so losing them is particularly significant.
📱 Checking mobile optimization of websites
Your site must be adapted for mobile devices — in other words, it should be mobile-friendly. Today, more than 50% of users access the internet via phones, and in some industries this percentage is even higher. Your target audience might be among them. You can learn more about mobile adaptation on the official Google page.
🛒 Analysis of product/service/pages assortment
When analyzing competitors, it is important to understand how many of their pages are indexed in search engines. These can be product pages, service pages, category pages, filter pages, blogs, and other materials that shape the site’s theme and relevance. You can find out an approximate number of such pages in Google using a simple search command:
site:example.com
If your site is an online store, it is recommended to create as many category and product pages as possible.
👀Traffic of competitors and its sources, average session duration, page views, bounce rate
It’s also important to analyze your competitors’ traffic and understand exactly where it’s coming from. For example, if a competitor’s website gets around 20,000 organic visits per month and has been around for more than three years, that’s a solid benchmark. It shows that such traffic volumes are realistic and worth aiming for.
However, it’s crucial to keep in mind that a site like this already has a history: it has built up authority in the eyes of search engines, gained a loyal audience, and accumulated traffic over time — not overnight.
You can use the SimilarWeb service for this type of analysis. In the free version, it provides data for the past three months. At the start of your research, you’ll be able to assess:
➤ Total website traffic,
➤ Traffic distribution by device (mobile/desktop),
➤ Estimated number of visitors per month,
➤ Number of unique users,
➤ Average session duration,
➤ Number of pages viewed per visit.
This data will help you understand how stable the competitor is and what their strengths are in attracting traffic.
Next, we can analyze the percentage distribution of users coming to the website through different channels: referral traffic, direct visits, organic search, paid (PPC) traffic, display advertising, social media, and email marketing. This helps us understand whether the competitor is actively using email campaigns, leveraging social media, and utilizing other marketing channels.
Next, you can analyze which channels users use to reach the competitor’s website and in what percentage. These may include:
➤ Direct traffic (when users type the address manually),
➤ Referrals from other websites (referral traffic),
➤ Organic search (SEO),
➤ Paid advertising (PPC),
➤ Display advertising,
➤ Social media traffic,
➤ Traffic from e-mail newsletters.
This kind of analysis shows which promotion channels the competitor uses. It helps us understand whether they utilize email marketing, how active they are on social media, and to what extent they rely on paid advertising.
📈Search engine rankings
Evaluating search engine rankings — both your own and your competitors’ — plays a crucial role. For online projects, it's important not only to generate traffic, leads, and conversions but also to maintain high (top) positions in organic search results.
To start, you need to define a list of key queries that are most important for your business to rank in the TOP for. Then, compare your rankings for these queries with those of your competitors. This will help identify where you’re falling behind and allow you to include a specific item in your SEO strategy — boosting rankings for those particular keywords.
The Serpstat tool is great for analyzing ranking differences — it lets you track who ranks where for your target keywords.
The platform allows you to upload your list of queries and displays data based on that set. It's important to remember to add competitors for tracking — the service does not charge for monitoring competitor rankings.
4. Conclusion
By using the tools and brief checklist provided in this article, you can conduct a comprehensive competitor analysis. Comparing the collected data with your own project will make it easy to identify both strengths and weaknesses — in your competitors’ strategies and your own. This helps highlight where your competitors are ahead, what you can adopt from them, and which benchmarks are worth aiming for to achieve — or even surpass — similar results.
Analyzing traffic channels and sources used by competitors will also give you valuable insights into where to focus your own marketing efforts.
Once you have clear data, solid figures, and an overall understanding of the competitive landscape, you’re ready to start building your own growth strategy.
If you want a high-quality and detailed competitor analysis, feel free to contact us — our specialists will prepare it professionally, tailored specifically to your business.
