Discover Your Competitor’s Secrets in 4 Easy Steps

Every SaaS founder bumps into competitors all the time. Sometimes, we get dazzled by their product, and sometimes it’s their marketing.

Talking about marketing, especially content marketing, there’s a lot to learn from each of them. And if you can combine all of their learnings at the same place, it can churn out your last mover’s advantages for your product.

In this short guide, we’ve put together a template that you can use to document all of your major competitor’s content marketing/SEO moves and catalogue them as per relevance.

Let’s understand it, learn why & how to use it, and watch over your competitors' content game at ease-

Organic Competitor Research Template

To discover competitors’ strategies, we move into a template that assesses the competitor’s SEO success, and filters it through some relevancy metrics like-
-Types of business (SaaS, Agency, Community, Marketplace)
-Competitive relevance (direct or indirect)
-Target users' persona
-Do they have a blog or not

Along with these factors, we’ll take SEO parameters such as monthly traffic, Authority Score(domain rating in Ahref’s terms), total backlinks, and total referring domains(# of sites the backlinks are from).

Done so, this template will give you a 100% insight into which competitors are bagging how much SEO success, and how much you could aspire from their SEO(content and backlink) strategy.

How to Fill in the Data?

Steps to fill in the data are-

1. Make a generic list of competitors who are directly/indirectly competing with you, and could be SaaS/Marketplace/Agency or any other business.
2. Go to SEMRush/Ahrefs, and use their bulk domain checker feature to collect their SEO data.
3. Add only important SEO metrics (Traffic/mo, Authority Score, Backlinks, Referring Domains) into consideration.
4. Sort out the sheet by Direct to Indirect competitors to keep the most important competitors’ data first.

A worked-out and blank template will be given in the comments for you to use.

Why Use This Template?

To identify and prioritize your competitors to several extent.
To have an understanding of who is prioritizing SEO as a marketing channel and who is not.
To select the best competitors to aspire your SEO content strategy

Using this template helps prioritize competitors, understand their SEO commitment, and inspire your strategy. Leverage these insights to propel your business to new heights in digital marketing.