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Learn Exactly How to Spy On Your Competitors & Dominate Your Local Market Posted by Tyson Downs on 12/4/14 12:40 PM
Do you know how other doctors in your area are marketing their practices? Are you aware of the online marketing strategies doctors are using to grow their practice and build their empire? Most likely, your competitors have websites that are similar to yours in terms and possibly even the same as yours. Have you ever heard of The Online Practice? They have a dentist choose from a few templates, and other than that, the client sites are all the same, if two dentists choose the same template, they'll have the same site-even much of the content is the same, just their personal, identifying info has been switched out. Are you reverse engineering your competitions online marketing strategy? Maybe you should. Let's review 8 techniques you can use to reverse engineer your competitors online marketing strategy and put together an effective online marketing strategy for your healthcare practice. Performing an online competition analysis can be one of the most strategic and effective things that you can do to grow your business. It allows you to find the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and figure out how they are performing the way
that they are. This information will help you to outsmart your competitors, grow your practice, and make you more profit. The below is very similar to the competition analysis that I perform for all of my healthcare online marketing clients. While analyzing your competitors, there are several things you have to consider:
1. Website Content Look at the content on your site, and then look at the content from one of your competitors. Your content should be well written (professional, yet personal) and the most important information above the fold (meaning before you scroll down the page). Take a look at some of the bigger players in your market, and see what type of content they have on their website. Special offers? Symbols of trust? What do they have? Which of these can you implement on your website? Are they using video, whitepapers, before and afters? Are you?
2. Organic Keywords Keywords are simply phrases. Phrases that you want to show up for in the search engines because your target customer is using these to find your services. An example if you are a dentist in Seattle would be: Seattle Dentist Dentist in Seattle Cosmetic Dentist in Seattle Invisalign Provider in Seattle etc. A few keywords for me would be: dental seo, websites for doctors, online marketing for healthcare professionals, etc. You can find some of the organic keywords your competitors are ranking for (and most likely targeting) using a tool such as SEMRush. SEMRush, as well as SpyFu will give you ideas of the keywords they are bidding on for Google Adwords, an estimated budget as well as ad copy. You don't just show up high for keywords, especially for competitive keywords without a strong online presence; which is typically built by you putting out great content, and an effective SEO campaign (both of these go hand in hand). Another quick way to see what they are going after is to install a Google Chrome toolbar extension called Woo Rank. WooRank will tell you lots of great stuff such as: Their Title Tag Their h1-h5 tags keywords and frequency on a page alt text they are using on images, etc
A phrase (keywords) that appears more than once on a competitor's webpage is probably being targeted by the competitor with his online marketing strategy; usually in both SEO and PPC (if they are doing both). While you can also look manually to find the information I mentioned, using a toolbar extension or other software will save you time, and after all, time is money right? If you want to, you can also perform the research of the site manually by just looking at the title tags (hovering your mouse over them), reading through the site to see what keywords they use, etc. Or you can look at the source code of the site, and though you may not have the technical expertise to know what it all means, you can get a good idea of what their title tag is, their heading tags are, and what keywords they are targeting. Though not as 'pretty' as Woo Rank, it is still very helpful.
3. Website Design Compare the design of your website with that of a few competitors. Try to stay objective. Which is most welcoming? Which is most appealing? Who's site loads faster? Do the graphics look professional? Are the colors nuetral? Is there obvious differences between your site and their site? And not in a good way. Do you notice similarities between multiple competitors? There could be a reason why. They may know something that you don't. Consider that if you are seeing something similar over and over while looking at these websites for healthcare profesionals. I know it's hard to take a close, hard look at something that you perhaps have a strong liking too and are protective of, but unless you understand your shortcomings, you won't be able to make progress.
4. Website Functionality This has to do with how user-friendly the forms, navigation menu, and other features on your competitors' sites are. Does your competitors' sites utilize online appointment booking? Do they offer real time contact via chat? Is the navigation easy to follow? Can you easily find their contact information? Are they incorporating different forms of media, including video? A website with good functionality is more likely to have better conversion rate than one that offers a poor user experience. You don't want your potential patients to do this because your website stinks.
5. Backlink Profile Since backlinks play a key role in rankings in the search engines, you'll want to take a look and see what kind of backlinks the website that rank higher for you are getting.
To do that, you can use multiple tools- WebMeUp, Majestic, Ahrefs, and others. I use a paid subscription with Ahrefs. Simply enter in the full url of the website you want to do an analysis on. For this one, we'll just enter in my domain titanwebagency.com. Here's what comes up:
We'll look at the domain rank and url rank. For a domain that is 9 months old, the domain and url rank isn't bad. Click on the little 'i' and it'll further explain domain and url rank. You'll then put in the url of your site and see how it compares. This gives you an idea of how an impartial tool see's the strength of your domain vs. that of your competitor. Now click on the word links in the left menu bar. It'll pull up this screen:
Then click on dofollow, and then sort by strength. This will sort the backlinks of that website by their domain strength. Obviously a higher domain strength the better. That said, it isn't the end all be all. That first backlink you see from 'list of domains', I doubt it does much any good. Then the link from my profile at behance.net is decent, but profile backlinks such as this aren't valued by Google as much as other backlinks where there is actual value added, such as this post I made over at Dentistry IQ.
What you are looking for when you review the backlinks of your competitors is area's of opportunity for you to obtain quality, relevant backlinks from the same websites. So consider the domain strength, if it's a dofollow backlink, the website, and how likely you are to get your own backlink from that site. Example: Say that you see that they are listed in the Care Credit Provider Directory. Wait a minute! You offer Care Credit! Login to your portal, add your info if it isn't there, and add your url. Bam. Backlink obtained. This one is the good kind too, it's a dofollow backlink.
6. Citations Citations, as many of you may know are an important part of local SEO for dentists and other doctors, and ranking in the Google local results. So, how can you find out what citations your competition has? Easy! Simply type in their name/address/phone in different variations. Example: Titan Web Agency It brings up this:
Every single one of those listings under my website are citations opportunities. Some are the traditional business directories like Yelp and Google My Business, others are social networks where a citation is available. As you go deeper and deeper into the search results, you'll see less well known websites. I would initially say to stick with the first 5 pages or so of citations. You can also search in Google by phone number, a variation of the name, or the name in quotes. Once you've gathered the list of citations that your competition is using, keep track of them on this downloadable spreadsheet. (For even more citation opportunities, be sure to read this post) When I am starting an online marketing campaign for doctors, I always pull a citation analysis report from BrightLocal. It's a paid tool (extremely worth it) and it show me where the top results in the local Google results are getting citations, and tells me if I have that citation as well. It's a beautifully done service, backed by some of the best minds in the SEO industry. Here's a screenshot of what you'll see. All of those 'Y' of course mean that there is a citation at that website, and if you click it, it will take you right to the page.
7. Sign up for their Emails Yes, you heard me right. Go to their website, and if they are offering something in exchange for signing up at their blog, then sign up! Get their free report if they have one. When they email you, read it, see what they are trying to accomplish, and if appropriate, consider implementing something similar. Doctors not using email marketing are cutting off a very profitable revenue stream.
8. Follow on Social Media Self explanatory, but follow them on all the social platforms, including YouTube. See how they communicate with their audience, and how their audience responds. Do they use a lot of video? What is the response? Are they mainly using Twitter? Figure out why.
Are they doing giveaways? How does that appear to be working for them? How can you use a similar approach to build your social media presence? Social media for doctors, dentists, and other healthcare professionals can be extremely powerful! Don't let the opportunity pass you by.
Once you have researched your competitors to see what they are doing, then consider mixing things up a bit. Consider testing some of the strategies and techniques that they are using. Be smart about it though. Start with one thing at a time. Once you have thuroughly tested it, then move onto the next strategy. Never stop testing. Sure, it can be a lot of work, it can be difficult at times or even tediuous, but the rewards in the long run can pay off more than you can imagine. Understanding the strategies your competitors are using will help you to improve your own business. Competitive analysis is very important if you want to remain and succeed in any business.
What Will You Do? Now that you have the knowledge necessary to see how your competitors are marketing online, what will you do to get a leg up? What will you do to take your practice to the next level? The ball's in your court, and it's time to play. What will you do?
Topics: Online Marketing