And so today, I’m actually combining two videos into one. I’m going to talk about how we conduct competitive analysis training, how we’ve created a process and how we delegate that to our team members, whether it’s a virtual assistant, project manager, so that they can develop and get all this information for us. And then we can have everything we need to make an informed decision.
So, let me dive into my computer real quick and show you guys kind of a bird’s-eye view of this process.
So what we like to do is, anytime we bring on a new client, we always conduct competitive research. Because you want to see what the top dogs are doing in the space. And a lot of times, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
Actually, hold on a sec. I learned that trick from the homie, Russell Brunson. If you haven’t read his book yet, go ahead and pick it up. But essentially, it talks about how you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, you just have to research who’s doing it right, take what they’re doing, repurpose it, and make it your own.
Now we make it a priority to conduct these competitive analysis trainings, documents, complete these, so we can do a bird’s-eye view. So what I’ll do is I’ll show you guys our actual document. This is the doc here, this is an analysis we’re doing for a potential client, and so, what we want to do is look at them at a bird’s-eye view, top level.
First, we’ll collect general information–a lot of this stuff is easy to access. It’s kind of crazy all the information you can get on your competitors. So let’s do Urban Skin RX, because they are probably the big dog in the space, I’m actually going to highlight them green, so you guys can see that.
And so quickly, by doing some things in our competitive analysis training, this is the document that I created for our team members so that I could delegate this. Because this is a painstaking process, it takes maybe 45 minutes, 30 minutes to do one analysis of one potential competitor.
And so, what I did was I did this once, twice, three times, perfected that process and then created a video training to teach our team members. As you can see, if I click video training on this doc, it takes you straight to a video, where now that VA or that person can go in and do that with due diligence.
The main reason I did this is because, once you have the process down pat, you can delegate that part, and then I can come back and look at that document.
This one’s not too long, it’s about a 12-minute training for our team. So essentially what we’ll do first is we’ll look at SimilarWeb, and SimilarWeb is a website that can give you a bunch of top-level stats on a website.
Now essentially, I’ll have the VA or person working on this pull certain data, so we’ll pull the CMS they’re using, which is the content management system. If they have Google Analytics installed, and if they have the Facebook Pixel installed. Those are important components.
If you see a competitor doesn’t have it installed, you might want to look into the reasoning behind that, and that’s what we do when we go in and review once this document is done.
Then through SimilarWeb, we can pull total visits—and again, these are averages and estimates, they might not be precise, but it does give you a general consensus. Their global rank, pages per visit, the top traffic sources, their top social.
Then we actually dive into another component, I’ll go through this doc, where we visit sub stack, and we also look at other items–and I don’t want to go into this and bore you guys to death with the robust details. But essentially, this is all public knowledge that you can pull pretty easily.
And then also, we have them do just an audit of the site, literally visit the site, see if they have a blog, right? Post the link to their blog, check if they have white papers, videos, podcasts, infographics, slide deck, FAQ’s, media kit, case studies.
We do this so that we could see what the top people are doing, because a lot of times we can repurpose or leverage their content and create better versions of it. And this is a great way to see that really quickly in a few minutes.
And then of course, we have our team members pull all their social media data. So the links to their Facebook, how many fans they have, their Twitter URL, how many Twitter followers, Instagram. We do the same thing with YouTube and Google, because they’re the main and primary platforms.
Another big piece of this is pulling examples of their ads–and a lot of this is manual stuff, so in most cases, you can pretty much pull anyone’s Facebook ads. You just go to their page and hit Info and Ads, I’ve gone over that in some other videos.
And so now, I can go into this doc, everything’s already prefilled and I can go in and look at what the competition’s doing. Now, it takes me straight to the active ads.
We also have our team members look at Google Ads, and essentially, it’s just them going to Google, doing searches and finding a few example ads that we can look at. Then they’ll take a screenshot, add that image into Dropbox, and now I can go and see what kind of ads they have. This lets me know that they have someone that knows what they’re doing.
They have a click to call extensions, they have review extensions, they have multiple link extensions here, so that tells me that this competitor is on their game.
Also, the last piece of what we pull–and again, this is the only one that’s not free–we pull this data from SEMrush. And so we have to look at the analytics, which is the organic traffic to the site: If they’re doing paid search, how much traffic or how much they’re spending on paid search per month. The keywords are traffic as well as traffic costs.
So potentially, if they’re getting a lot of organic traffic, this is what it could cost if they’re paying for it, about 25 grand.
Next we look at these two components that are super important: branded traffic and non-branded traffic. Branded, meaning search terms that include the brand name, which tells me that this is a popular brand, people are already searching for it. Then non-branded traffic, meaning people that are searching for products that don’t have the business name in it.
So for example, you might have Nike or you might have Air Jordan 2, right? That’s branded traffic. Or you might have basketball sneakers, which is non-branded traffic.
And so these are the data points that we pull right now. We might add more as we go, but essentially–I’m telling you guys–once you create and itemize your process, it makes it so much easier to create a video and delegate this to team members, especially individuals that are doing a lot of data entry and specific work of this type.
Because now, once they finish this document, I can go in and I can look at all the data at a top level—where it’s data from multiple websites that we’ve curated and created internally to get that process done.
Guys, I hope you got some value from it, I know it was a lot in a few minutes, but I just—and I’ll go over the doc too. So we essentially do the SimilarWeb, we do serve stat, we have them actually do an audit of the site. We look at social media, we look at ad strategy, and we look at basic SEO.
And so, that is the overview guys, I hope you got some value and I’ll see you next week.
