How to Analyze Competitor Landing Pages for Higher Conversions

Competitors are actually great teachers

So, you’re building a website for your business, that’s great. But where do you start? Competitors are a great place to start for a plethora of reasons:

1. They help validate your idea and show you that there’s market potential.
2. You get a blueprint of what works for your target audience (considering their target audience is the same as yours)–what kind of messaging they prefer, tonality, content, products, solutions, etc.
3. An idea of what and who you’re going up against i.e. who you’re competing with and can you stand out.
4. Understand what pain points your competitors prioritize and how they solve them.
5. Identify gaps in competitor landing pages and strategically use that to create an edge for yourself.

Competitors help you define a structure to follow without having to take a shot in the dark and potentially save time iterating things that don’t need iterations. Early days of building a startup (and your online brand presence) entail a lot of research, market analysis conversation, and validation. Almost every step of this process can benefit tremendously from competitor analysis.

When it comes to landing pages–these are the building blocks of your brand and in most cases, a user’s introduction to your business. As the internet became increasingly convoluted, people’s attention spans have gotten shorter and the benchmark for grabbing that attention is pretty high. Your landing page needs to meet these expectations if you want to lower bounce rates and increase conversions. Your competitor’s landing page is the perfect place to start.

How to analyze the competitor's landing page

Keyword and SERP analysis

We’re assuming that if you have competitors, you’ve identified your target audience or group (TG) and perhaps even your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

• Begin by identifying keywords that your target audience would most likely use. Here’s a good thought process: consider that you are your TG and think from that perspective. What would you search for if you’re looking for a solution? Make a list of these keywords.
• Search that keyword and open the first 3-5 results that show up. These are the top competitors you would have to go up against.
• If you want to go deeper into competitors, you can explore multiple search engine results pages (SERPs) and analyze as many competition landing pages as you’d like. That’s your call.

What we talked about is the fundamental way to get started with keyword research (and it’s free). There are other ways to go about this such as leveraging tools like Semrush and Ahrefs – these are SEO/SEM tools that give deep insights into keywords, rankings, and competition.

Let’s take Ahrefs for example. Once you have a keyword list, you can add them to the Keyword Explorer tool that Ahrefs offers and get a single dashboard view of all the ranking web pages for these keywords. You can also get traffic breakdown, keyword volume, difficulty, demographic, and other important insights that can potentially help you make a decision about which keywords to target.

Copy and messaging

Your TG also greatly influences how you should communicate with them. How you would talk to C-suite executives is not how you would talk to fashion designers–each TG responds to a different tone of communication and how your competitors have approached messaging on their landing pages gives you a lot to work with.

Once you’ve figured out which competitors are ranking for your targeted keywords, you need to understand why they are ranking above the other competitors–what sets them apart? Here are a few things to keep in mind when you’re analyzing your competitors’ landing page:

• Headline and description: Generally, you should get a quick overview of what your competitor is offering from their headline and description. Pay close attention to how they’ve formulated their service in the first scroll itself.
• Product features: Headlines are usually followed by brief explanations of the product or service. Observations below will fuel how you approach messaging for your website.
  • Do you understand what your competitor does from these 4-5 key features?
  • If they’re ranking so high, they’ve done something right: look for keywords on the page, messaging structure, and tone. Are they straightforward or are they more humorous with their approach?
  • Are they verbose or succinct?

• CTAs and conversion actions: These are how users will connect with you so they have to compelling enough.
  • How have they communicated their CTAs and what are they pushing for?
  • What kind of messaging have they used for their CTAs?
  • How is the placement?

Let’s take Zapier’s homepage as an example -

Zapier is a cross-platform automation no-code tool that lets you connect multiple tools and automate your everyday tasks with a simple drag-and-drop interface to create workflows.

This is quite clearly and concisely explained in their headline and description. You don’t even need to read it twice. Zapier’s TG is everyday professionals and entrepreneurs who want to save time. Hence, their messaging also extends this narrative and positions themselves as a brand that values time through simple messaging.

Here’s another example of a brand that will not work for you as a startup. Gainsight’s headline is an introduction to their new AI showcase followed by a description that is too vague or broad. This isn’t wrong.

In fact, Gainsight was one of the earliest customer success platforms and they’ve come a long way. As an established brand, they have the liberty to use words that might not define a niche problem and still have great results.

However, something like this doesn't work for a startup because people don’t know you yet. There are way too many options on the internet and people’s diminishing attention spans will not be patient enough to understand words (or product descriptions) that they’re not familiar with.

Become a customer of your competitor

In order to see the bigger picture, you will have to go beyond just your competitor’s landing page. Dig deeper into your competitor’s services and their content for a holistic view and blueprint. Here are some things to look for and consider in your competitor analysis process:

• Their content and marketing collaterals: Read their blogs and ebooks to understand what topics they address. Sign up for their newsletter to stay up-to-date with what they communicate to their customers. Read their case studies to see how they’re helping their customers.
• Use their product: A lot of tools offer free trials or demos to give a trailer of how their product works. This can help you connect the dots between how their product works and how have they communicated that on their landing page.
• UX and navigation: The user experience is detrimental to higher conversions. As we mentioned earlier, users have very low tolerance nowadays, and complicating navigation, onboarding, or conversions is a surefire way to see an increase in drop-offs. How have your competitors done it? How seamless did it seem to you? Can you make it better?

For example, Slack offers one of the most seamless experiences in SaaS today. A streamlined onboarding flow helps users focus on one thing at a time and go through the entire process without losing interest. This also works extremely well for products that might be sophisticated or overwhelming to understand at first.

To learn more about how Slack perfected onboarding, read this article.

Analyze their data

There are more data points you can gather about specific competitors after you’ve identified them with tools like Ahrefs and Semrush. This gives you more in-depth knowledge about your competitor's organic traffic, backlinks, domain strength, top-performing landing pages, and keywords (that we discussed already).

In fact, Ahrefs has a Competitive Analysis module built that lets you visualize your website against your competitors and understand where you’re lagging behind. Of course, this only works if you’ve built your website and are now are in the process of optimizing it.

Some methods and tips to help you:

1. See how many of their pages are on SERPs and which keywords each of them ranks for.
   • On Ahrefs, you can add your domain and your competitor’s domain which filters out keywords that they’re ranking for.
   • Observe the Content Gap report and filter out the keywords using the Main Positions Only button. Keywords with low difficulty and high volume should be a priority for you.
   • Make a list of these keywords and start using them in your content strategy.
   • Also, observe keyword overlap to see which competitors are most relevant to you. You can prioritize competitors based on this overlap
2. Explore where your competitor’s traffic is coming from and replicate that for your website.
   • Tools like Ahrefs let you explore competitor traffic through the Site Explorer tool. Enter your competitor’s domain and see which pages get the most traffic.
   • If their templates bring significant traffic, this can be an indicator for you to work on templates as well.
   • Pro tip: You can also filter to see which region they get the most traffic from. This information can be particularly helpful while running ads.
3. Identify opportunities by seeing where your competitors are not performing well and dive deeper into those areas specifically–this is where you can create an edge.
   • During keyword analysis, you can filter by keywords for which your competitors are not performing well.
   • If these keywords are highly relevant to you, use them extensively to get an edge in SERPs.
4. Analyze internal linking and technical SEO such as page load time, sitemaps, scripts, etc. These are factors that you’ll have to include in your website too.
   • By using features like Link Intersect, you can see where your competitors get backlinks from.
   • Look for domains and webpages where your competitors have been listed as “to try” tools. You would want to be listed on these websites as well.

Competitor ad analysis

Ad performance is also interlinked with your landing pages and if you’ve decided to go ahead with the paid media route, analyzing your competitor’s ads and their landing pages will help you understand how to write better copies.

How can competitor ad analysis help with your landing pages?

• The keywords you’re targeting on your landing page should be similar or closely related to what the messaging is like in your ad copies. If your ad talks about “AI chatbot for customers” but your landing page is more about “AI agents for support teams” then people will leave in less than a couple of seconds.
  • You can observe this in your own ads through metrics like ad relevancy and quality score. These will help you know if you’re on the right track or if you need to recenter your focus.
• What are your competitors talking about? The problems that get the most attention are what you too should focus on. Check out your competitors’ ads and creatives and see how they link to their landing page. Understanding this will help you identify industry trends, pain points, and become more aware of what to talk about on your landing pages.

How can you go about it? A few simple steps to get started:

• You can start by searching for the keywords you’re targeting. Read the ads that show up in the SERPs and try to interpret what you understand from them.
• Open these links and read through their landing page to compare what they said in the ad vs what they said on the page.
• Engage with them on social media so you might see their ads when you scroll. In case you do, observe what creatives have they used, messaging, and the linked landing page.

Competitor ad analysis has more connotations and there are quite a few factors that even searching won’t help with. This is where tools can help identify competitor ads and give you actionable insights not just to improve ads but to enhance landing pages for better conversions.

Lucky for you, we’ve made ad analysis easier with our Competitor Ad Intelligence tool that not only lets you track competitor ads but also draws actionable insights to help you win.

• A complete view of your competitors’ ads and which channels are they active on.
• Reveal their ad spend and get a pulse on their budget for your own ad campaigns.
• View all their ads–creatives, copies, messaging–all in one place.
• Actionable insights and recommendations on which channels to focus on and what angles to look at.‍

Get Free Access →