Competitive Analysis
- Activity Time
- 3-4 hours
- Materials
- This one is done digitally - we use Google Sheets
- Participants
- One or two internal team project members
The products and services we design don’t exist in a vacuum. Almost every venture is bound to have competitors in the field competing for an audience or customers. When beginning a project, it’s important to take a look at the competitive landscape – our competitive analysis is best used for websites, and takes stock of the usability, site metrics, and tone of a site’s competition compared to their own. Identifying where other sites are lacking presents an opportunity for your site to pull ahead of the rest.
Instructions
- Identify up to six competitors that exist in your project’s space. If you are redesigning an existing site, replace the first competitor column with your own site to see how you measure up.
- Go through each category and assess each site on the metrics listed using a scale of 0-3. In Google Sheets, you can right-click to add notes to a cell, which is helpful to remind yourself and others as to why you gave a rating you did.
- For the “Tone + Emotional Resonance” column, replace the tone words with language relevant to your brand.
- For Site Metrics, use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, and Moz Pro for inbound links. To see the number of indexed pages, simply search the site:[site domain here] on Google and check the number of results returned.
- Next take a look at each site’s presence on social media and their followers. A follow count indicates how big of an influence a site has and where they focus their marketing efforts, as well as where you can surpass them.
- The final two sections will be dependent on your project. For content, take the time to ascertain what pages and content types are common across sites and catalog who has what, a bit like a mini content audit.
- For features, catalog functionality and features you see across the site as well as any “wishlist” items you know your stakeholders have requested.
- This sheet can be groomed into a deliverable ready to be sent to the client as a guide you can both use going forward.
