How to Do a Competitive Audit: Process, Tools & Mistakes to Avoid

Do you know what your competitors are up to right now?

Because there’s a good chance they’re analyzing your business, looking for weak spots and planning their next move.

I’ll show you exactly how to conduct a competitive audit (including tools to use and mistakes to avoid) so you can analyze top competitors and gain actionable insights that help you get or stay ahead.

Key Takeaways:

• Do a competitive audit once a year. More often if you’re in a highly competitive industry.
• Use my tool suggestions to automate data collection. Then focus on analysis and execution.
• Avoid common mistakes like blindly copying competitor strategies or ignoring indirect competitors.

What Is a Competitive Audit and Why Should You Do One?

A competitive audit is a process for analyzing your competitors and comparing their businesses to yours. It assesses everything from competitors’ marketing and branding to their pricing and customer experience.

This type of audit uses a standard framework to help you research and identify the competition’s strengths and weaknesses as well as the threats and opportunities they create for your business.

The result?

You get actionable insights that you can implement immediately, giving you the information you need to make smarter decisions about your business strategy and growth trajectory.

How Competitive Intelligence Benefits Your Business

Gathering competitive data benefits your business in several different ways. An audit can help you:

• Benchmark Your Business Performance: Compare your performance to the competition to understand how well your business is really doing.
• Refine Your Value Proposition: Establish what differentiates your business from the competition so you can fine-tune your positioning and messaging.
• Improve Your Marketing Strategy: Learn which marketing channels and tactics competitors are using and spot gaps your business can fill.
• Understand Customer Sentiment: Find out how customers feel about the competition and identify opportunities for your business.

When to Perform a Competitive Audit

At a minimum, I recommend doing a competitive analysis once a year. This cadence allows you to keep an eye on key players in your industry, but it doesn’t involve frequent strategic shifts.

If you’re in a more competitive industry (e.g., tech, ecommerce, energy, or healthcare) there’s a good chance you need to monitor the competition more frequently. Consider a semiannual or even quarterly competitive analysis.

You should also conduct a competitor audit when you’re planning a major change or a big launch. Take time to do a competitive analysis before your business expands into a new market or launches a new product or service.

It’s a good idea to consider activity in your industry as well. Aim to get a current view of the competitive landscape after significant merger and acquisition activity or when new competitors enter the space.

Competitor Analysis Tools to Simplify Your Audit

Use these competitor audit tools to collect data and speed up analysis.

Competitive Intelligence Tools

Plug your competitors into Klue, and the platform will automatically monitor changes to their websites, products, and pricing as well as watch for news and reviews. It then aggregates insights and shares them with marketing, sales, product, and customer success teams to help everyone make more informed decisions.

Crayon tracks everything about your competitors, from customer reviews to news announcements to pricing updates. Then, it shares highlights so your team knows exactly what’s happening with the competition. The platform also creates battlecards that highlight how your product stands out from the competition.

SEO and PPC Analysis Tools

SE Ranking evaluates competitors’ organic and paid traffic so you can see how your search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) strategies stack up. This tool lets you compare your keyword rankings, traffic share, backlinks, and domain trust to your top competitors. Plus, it helps you find opportunities to get ahead.

Ahrefs gives you insight into competitors’ SEO and PPC strategies, including data on website structure, backlink profile, and keyword position. You can use Site Explorer’s comparative charts to analyze fluctuations in paid or organic performance. Then, you can use the intel to guide your own strategy.

Social Media Analysis Tools

Sprout Social tracks and compares competitors’ social media audience growth and performance metrics against yours. And with the platform’s competitive analysis listening tool, you can compare metrics like share of voice and customer sentiment to see where your brand is winning — and where you have room to improve.

Socialinsider monitors competitors’ social media followers and engagement rates so you can see how your social profiles compare. Use it to identify the competition’s best social channels and get inspiration from their top performing content. And check the industry benchmarks to find new opportunities for your brand.

How to Conduct a Competitive Audit in 5 Steps

I’ll walk you through how to analyze other businesses in your space so you can maintain a competitive edge.

1. Decide on Goals and Scope

Start by getting clear on the purpose of your audit.

What do you want to uncover and why? For example, you might want to:

• Gain a better understanding of your market share before moving forward with an expansion
• Analyze competitors’ offerings to make your next big launch more successful
• Understand how competitors approach SEO so you can attract more search traffic

Let your objectives define the scope of the competitive analysis.

We’ll use the SEO audit as an example. To analyze competitors’ SEO strategies, you need:

• Quantitative data like traffic metrics, keyword performance, and backlink profiles
• Qualitative data like content quality, alignment with search intent, and topical gaps

2. Define Your Competitors

Next, create a list of competitors to analyze.

If this isn’t your first audit or if you’ve already done extensive market research, you probably already have a list of competitors in your space.

But if you’re conducting your first audit or if you need to update your list, you have a few options for identifying competitors:

• Analyze your CRM or sales call data to find the competitors that prospects mention most often.
• Check a PPC tool to find the top sites that bid for your paid keywords.
• Use an SEO tool to find the other sites that rank for your money keywords.

Say you need to identify the top competitors for the sneaker company New Balance. Plug the domain into an SEO tool to generate a list of organic competitors. Here’s how it works with SE Ranking:

Aim to create a list of three to five direct competitors. Then, add a couple of indirect competitors to the list. This approach allows you to analyze the competitors closest to you while helping you understand how your niche is evolving.

3. Gather Competitive Data

Now you’re ready to gather competitive intelligence. The workflow depends on the goals and scope of the audit and the tools you choose.

Use the suggestions I shared above to find the best tools for your needs. The right tool will automate most of the data collection process so you can focus more on the analysis and action plan.

Let’s build on the SEO audit example. With an SEO tool like SE Ranking, you can measure your SEO performance against your top competitors to compare traffic and keyword coverage.

Plus, you can generate a list of the keyword rankings that are unique to your site. Or the keywords that competitors rank for but that you’re missing.

4. Analyze Competitive Intelligence

All that data you collected? Plug it into an analytical framework.

One of the most common approaches to use is a SWOT analysis, which benchmarks your performance by evaluating your:

• Strengths: Where your business has the advantage (e.g., the most search traffic)
• Weaknesses: Where your business is at a disadvantage (e.g., your search traffic is declining rapidly)
• Opportunities: Where your business can get ahead (e.g., your newly launched product has dozens of valuable keywords to pursue)
• Threats: Where your business has the potential to fall behind (e.g., a new competitor that’s generating a ton of buzz and capturing a lot of organic traffic)

Another option is a competitive positioning matrix. It creates a side-by-side comparison of your business against the competition, helping you see how your products, pricing structures, target audiences, and other elements stack up.

5. Synthesize Your Findings

Once you’ve completed your analysis, pull everything together into a report that you can share with stakeholders.

Include your analysis, links to the original data, and an action plan. In the action plan, outline the steps you plan to take in response to the data.

Say you identified a couple of competitors that outrank your business for some critical keywords. Your action plan might include revisiting your content strategy and updating pieces with low organic traffic.

What to Do With Your Competitor Audit Findings

Once you’ve done the research and completed the audit, put your findings to work. Use the goals you set at the beginning of the audit to guide this part of the process.

Update Your Positioning

Want to differentiate your business from the competition? Use your competitive positioning analysis to make some critical changes.

Redefine your target audience and update your buyer personas to make sure they reflect the customers you want to attract.

Then, revisit your value proposition. Rethink your messaging and update your website and sales enablement materials.

Adjust Your Strategy

Need to change your approach to content marketing, social media marketing, or PPC? Use your SWOT analysis to inform your approach.

Make a plan to address the weaknesses and threats you identified. Clarify the channels you’ll use, the content you’ll create, and the publishing cadence you’ll follow.

Then, decide how you’ll take advantage of the opportunities you identified. Make sure your updated strategy still allows you to maintain your strengths.

Plan Product Launches or Market Expansion

Have a new product to release or a market to enter? Use your competitive matrix to outline a plan.

Clarify how you’ll deal with the external threats and barriers that could compromise your launch or expansion. Or decide which products make the most business sense to prioritize as you expand into the new market.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Analyzing Competitors

Watch out for these stumbling blocks as you go through your competitive audit.

Replicating Competitors’ Strategies

As you collect data on your competitors, it’s easy to concentrate on areas where they’re excelling.

Say they get twice as much organic search traffic or they have 10 times larger social media audiences. You might start to think you should prioritize similar goals.

But before you decide to follow a similar strategy, you need to know why and how they achieved these results. And you have to look at the bigger picture.

For example, your top competitor may have invested most of their marketing budget in SEO.

That may have allowed them to dominate the search engine results pages (SERPs). But it may have left very little for other channels, causing them to have comparatively tiny ad budgets or small social media audiences.

Or you might find that a key competitor has a massive social media following that you’d love to replicate. But closer analysis might show that they have low social media engagement, making the audience less valuable.

Forgetting About Indirect Competitors

A thorough competitive analysis takes time and resources. If you’re short on either, you might be tempted to analyze your closest competitors only.

Auditing direct competitors is a great place to start. This approach helps you prioritize businesses most similar to yours that provide the most immediate threat to your success.

But this shouldn’t be the extent of your analysis.

Instead, add both direct and indirect competitors to your list. This way, you gain a more complete understanding of the market, including alternative solutions to the problems your company solves.

Relying on Outdated Data

That competitor audit you completed 18 months ago? It’s much less valuable to your brand now.

Sure, the findings are still valid. But the landscape has probably changed in the meantime — potentially undergoing a dramatic transformation.

For example, the SEO strategy your top competitor used to rank for every major industry keyword might not apply anymore, now that AI overviews have launched and search traffic is declining.

That’s why developing an action plan from an outdated audit is almost always a bad idea and a fast track to wasting marketing spend.

Instead, I recommend performing a competitor audit at least once a year. If you’re in a competitive industry, aim to update your research every three to six months to make sure you’re always working from up-to-date information.

Conclusion

It doesn’t matter how new or how established your business is. No company operates in isolation.

To operate and grow a successful business, you need to keep an eye on the competition.

My competitive audit framework helps you approach the process in a systematic way. So you can see how your business really compares to the competition and you can make smarter strategic decisions.