Ever wished you had a magic mirror that could look into your competitors marketing strategy and tell you how to be the fairest of them all (or is that just a really weird analogy..)?

No magic mirror required. There’s software that will do that for you!

In this video I break down how to reverse engineer your competitor’s digital marketing strategy using free or trial software so you can do it yourself if you want too.

After watching this video you’ll know:

How to find where your competitors have their businesses listed and linked to online

How to tell if your competitors are running ads (along with seeing how much they’re spending, what keywords they’re bidding on, and the exact ad copy they’re using)

Whether their social media marketing is bringing them any customers

How to tell what keywords your competitors are ranking for and how much organic traffic they are getting

How to tell where they’re getting their referral traffic

Sound good?

Let’s go!

(But first, a tip to save you some time)

Life is crazy busy and your time is valuable, so I don’t want to waste it.

For that reason I added a kind of contents below the video with time stamps. That way you can watch the bits you’re interested in and skip everything else.

If you want to watch the whole thing though, here’s a tip to make it lots quicker:

On the youtube video, click on the little cog icon in the bottom right hand corner. In the pop up, choose “Speed”, then in the Speed options choose 1.5 times or 2 times faster.

It’s kind of like speed reading for video. You’ll be surprised how good your retention of info is even at double speed (and no, it won’t make me sound like a chipmunk..)!

What this video covers

0.00 – Intro to reverse engineering your competitor’s marketing strategies

2.00 – How to see where your competitors have their businesses listed online

2.30 – How to see if a competitor has a Google My Business page (which will help them rank in the map results if it is well optimised and they have enough links and business citations (listings) online)

4.20 – What factors organic results predominantly rely on

6.30 – Checking business listings through Whitespark and Fiverr

9.00 – How to use backlink checking tools to find what sites are linking to your competitors

11.35 – Using Open Site Explorer for links and Domain / Page Authority

12.45 – Why you need to take site stats with a grain of salt

13.40 – Using Majestic to check links and Trust / Citation Flow

14.40 – Using SEMRush to check links

14.55 – Using AHREFs to check links

16.16 – Seeing which links have the highest authority to focus on

17.45 – Seeing which pages on your competitor sites are getting the most traffic

18.58 – How to use AnswerthePublic.com for content marketing ideas

21.45 – How to see what search terms your competitors are ranking for and how much traffic they’re getting

24.55 – Using Similarweb to find referral traffic sources

27.50 – How to see if your competitors are running paid advertising campaigns, including seeing how much they’re paying, what keywords they’re bidding on, who they’re competing against etc.

30.00 – Looking at ad statistics to see which ads and keywords are most effective for your competitors and to see competitor ad copy

32.50 – Seeing how your competitors are going with their social media campaigns

36.30 – How to use the Facebook Insights tool to find out which of your competitor’s page updates are most popular

One thing I messed up in the video, at around the 20 minute mark when using SEMRush to look at rankings and volume of search traffic, I forgot to change the results to AU rather than US, so they’re not totally accurate.. Sorry!

Where to go next

So now you know how to reverse engineer your competitor’s digital marketing strategy.

But did you know that we can set up a campaign that will be almost impossible for your competitors to analyse and replicate?

Yep, we can do that. Use the button below, fill out our application form and we can talk more about it on your initial discovery call.

If you liked this video, you might also be interested to check out the other three walkthroughs in the Trust Metric Digital Marketing Basics series:

If you’d like to download the mindmap that was used to structure this video and the others in the digital marketing basics series you can do that by clicking here.

Links mentioned in the video walkthrough:

SEMrush

Majestic

Open Site Explorer

AHREFs

SpyFu

Answer the Public

WhiteSpark

Fiverr