You are here: Home / Blog / The Astounding Information You Can Learn from Analyzing Your Competitor’s Top-Performing Pages

The Astounding Information You Can Learn from Analyzing Your Competitor’s Top-Performing Pages

By Sasha Hazanow on Nov 24, 2021

The famous painter Pablo Picasso once said, “Good artists borrow, but great artists steal.” While it would be difficult to see any kind of “theft” in Picasso’s specific form of artistry (Cubism), the point is still the same. If you want to leapfrog your competition, you have to have a solid understanding of who they are in the first place.

That’s why any kind of successful digital marketing strategy has to take competitive insights into account. Your competitors have most likely analyzed the market on their own terms. You can expect their marketing approach reflects that research and what works for them in the real world.

Your competitor’s top-performing web pages can be a gold mine of information that you can (and should) be able to exploit for your own purposes. After all, they’re trying to serve the same market that you are, so why not spy on their efforts to see what their audience is responding to?

What Goes into a Top Performing Web Page?

When laying out your digital marketing strategy, it can be tempting to isolate one metric above others. Often, the only thing that some businesses focus on is traffic. After all, if you can get more eyeballs onto your page, then it must be performing well, right?

Not exactly. The best web pages not only bring in a bunch of traffic, but also convert that traffic as well. This could mean sales, sign-ups, even membership logins.  The sky’s the limit.

Consider two examples:

  • Page A is a landing page for mailing list sign-ups that receives 10,000 views a month, but only 3% of the people actually punch in their email address.
  • Page B is similar, but only gets 2000 views a month. Still, it converts at a 20% rate.

Which one is better? According to the math, page B gets 100 more sign-ups a month, which makes it a better-performing page.

The same concept can apply to any other page on a competitor’s site using various criteria: number of links, social shares, keywords or even traffic, whatever is actually the primary goal. Whatever your objective is, your top-performing pages should feed it the most.

Focus on These Five Insights

In order to identify your competitor’s top-ranked pages, you’ll need access to software that can perform a basic site audit and tell you hidden details about how your competitor’s audience is using their website. There is a lot of helpful software available, and each has its own merits. Spyfu and SEMRush are two you may want to look into or expect your local marketing agency to consider.

1. Your Competitor’s Most Popular Product or Service

If you are planning on launching a new business, the concept may sound good in your head, but seeing how a similar business performs in real life is going to tell you a lot more. If you’re planning on launching a new product or service inside of your niche, it’s a good idea to check the views on the product landing pages on your competitor’s website. Depending on the price and other market factors, it may be worth it to offer a similar product to your own audience or pivot to something else entirely.

2. Target Audience

Traffic to a website can come from a variety of referral sources such as social media, paid ads and affiliate sales, among others. Most of the time, that type of traffic is the result of a digital marketing strategy that your competitor is intentionally implementing for better or for worse.

Identifying these top-performing pages is a good way to see which product or service your competitor is pushing even if it’s for a limited period of time such as for a product launch or an overstock sale. If you really want to take this strategy to the next level, track their top-performing pages over the course of a few years. At the end of the day, tracking these pages gives you an insight into where their attention is directed.

3. Active Membership Statistic

Fostering an online community is a great way to create engagement and generate a loyal following for a business. Customers can discuss different products, share ideas on how to best use or modify products, or create wish lists for what they want from that company next.

How active is your competitor’s community? Any brand that has a “sign in” page should list that among their top performing pages, so you’ll be able to see how many times that page is viewed, as well as how many unique visitors it receives. If the membership doesn’t seem very active, then that may be an opportunity you can exploit for your own business.

4. Ranking Keywords

Keyword research is an essential part of most digital marketing strategies, but it’s possible for businesses to rank for keywords and not even be aware of it. If they aren’t aware, then of course they have not optimized those keywords. Their lost opportunities, however, can give you a chance to increase your own traffic by noting and optimizing those keywords.

By identifying high-value keywords and developing better content around them with additional keywords, you can create pages that convert better. And better-converting pages can drive more revenue for your business.

If your competitors do seem to be on the ball with their keyword research, then you may also identify keyword gaps in their content that you can exploit. A more focused content strategy that focuses on specific user intent can explode your conversion rate, turning regular pages into some of your website’s superstars.

5. Abandoned Carts

If you run an e-commerce shop, you know all too well the agony of an abandoned cart. Someone has showed some level of intent with your product, but clicked out of the browser just seconds before pulling out their credit card to purchase it.

You’re not alone. The Baymard Institute recently released a study that showed the average cart abandonment rate is close to 70% across a variety of niches and industries.

You will want to check out your competitor’s success and failures with shopping carts. With the right tools, you can see the number of unique users that put something in their shopping carts then continued on to checkout and actually bought the items. You can also see how many abandoned their shopping carts and did not reach checkout. In other words, you can determine how your competitors compare to you in number of abandoned shopping carts and whether or not they rank above or below that 70% average.

At Umbrella Local, We Have the Tools to Help!

No digital marketing strategy is complete without first evaluating the competitive landscape, and Umbrella Local has the software and the expertise to make that possible! Contact Umbrella Local today to see how we can help your website attract more traffic, motivate more conversions and blow past the competition in search rankings.

Metadescription: Analyzing your competitors’ web pages should be an important part of your digital marketing strategy.

Share This Article

Subscribe to our newsletter

Join thousands of marketing managers who get our best digital marketing insights, strategies and tips delivered straight to their inbox.

    How is your
    website's SEO?

    Use our free tool to get your score calculated in under 60 seconds.

      captcha

      Our Locations

      Alternative content for the map
      contact calling icon

      Ready to speak with a marketing expert? Give us a ring

      (646)440-1426

      google ratingfive star customer rating