Your website may be the heart of your online presence, but how does it measure up to your competitors?
Without the right insights, it’s easy to lose traffic, miss out on potential customers, or watch your competitors take the lead in search results and conversions.
Many businesses and agencies struggle to understand where their websites fall short—whether in design, functionality, or user experience.
The result?
You may unknowingly drive visitors to your competition, losing them at critical moments of their journey.
That’s where comparing your website to a competitor’s becomes crucial. It helps you uncover performance gaps, identify what’s working for them, and refine your strategy.
But this can feel overwhelming if you don’t know where to start. Should you focus on SEO? Load speed? Design elements?
In this guide, we’ll show you step-by-step how to perform a website comparison effectively. By the end, you'll know how to analyze key factors like keywords, traffic, and usability.
With these insights, you’ll be equipped to make data-driven improvements, stay ahead of the competition, and turn your website into a conversion machine.
Why Compare Your Website to Competitors?
Website comparison is essential for staying competitive. By understanding what’s working well for your competitors, you can identify weaknesses in your own website and discover opportunities to improve.
Here are a few key benefits:
Spot Weaknesses
A competitor analysis shows you where your website may fall short in areas like speed, design, or content.
Identify Strengths
You can learn from what your competitors do well, whether it’s better usability, more engaging content, or superior SEO.
Gain a Competitive Edge
By adopting what works for them and improving upon it, you can leapfrog competitors and capture more traffic and conversions.
Compare Your Website to Your Competitors: 6 Tips for Effective Analysis
Identify your competitors
To get started, you have to know who your competitors are. Chances are, you already know your competitors if you’ve done market research.
In that case, you can list those competitors and pick which ones you want to compare your website with first.
If you don’t know your competitors or are clueless about where to start, there are several ways to identify competitors. We’ll break it down in two ways.
Analyzing a website is a huge task if you don’t know what you’re looking for. Narrowing the scope of your analysis will save you time.
Google Search
Go on Google and type in keywords describing your business or keywords you want to rank for. The search results will reveal your competitors–some of which may be surprising.
Look at both organic search and paid ads for a better perspective of your competitive landscape.
Panoramata
You can also use Panoramata, an all-in-one competitor tracking platform, to research competitors.
Visit the Panoramata site and sign up. Go to the dashboard and click Brands Search.
If you already know your competitors, you can look them up on Panoramata and view their brand page where you can find a large database of their emails, ads, landing pages, content calendar, SMS, tech stack, and other useful information.
Otherwise, if you want to identify competitors, type in the industry you belong to or the type of product you sell. Click enter and then choose relevant competitors from the search results.
Click on a brand to be directed to their brand page.
You can also go to Benchmarks and select an industry from our benchmark list. You will then see brands belonging to that industry.
Click on a brand to go to their brand page and find out more about what data you can track.
Set your objective (what do you want to achieve?)
Analyzing a website is a huge task if you don’t know what you’re looking for. Narrowing the scope of your analysis will save you time.
There are so many aspects of a website that you can dissect. For example, you might want to focus on their keyword rankings and SEO.
You can also just be interested in their site architecture and engagement. Or perhaps, you want to analyze all these things and more.
It’s up to you but make sure you define your goal before digging in.
Compare your website visually and structurally
The first thing to do is a visual check of your competitor’s website. The best thing about this is you don’t need fancy software. You only need to be observant and know what to look for.
When you land on their website, scope out the similarities and differences between your website and theirs. Imagine you are a customer for that brand and you just landed on their website.
What are the design elements that stand out to you? How is the user experience? Are there any lags or confusing elements?
Next, notice the website structure.
How does the brand organize its website? Is it easy to navigate?
Click on their navigation menu and visit their categories and subcategories. How does their website structure to your website? Is your website missing something?
Use these observations to find opportunities to improve your website’s user experience and in turn, your search rankings (since this is tied to website structure as well).
Other things you can check are:
- Visual Appeal: Does their design seem polished and modern? Does it look old-fashioned or chaotic? That can affect user experience as well.
- Mobile-Friendliness: Visit their website from a mobile device. How does it look compared to the desktop website? More people shop on their phones and tablets more than ever so mobile-friendliness is paramount.
Compare traffic
Knowing your competitor’s website traffic volume will give you a sense of where you stand and how big of a threat your competitor poses.
If you monitor multiple competitors’ websites, you can also benchmark your performance against your peers.
To compare website traffic, you need competitor tracking tools like Similarweb or Semrush. However, note that the figures they give are only approximations so don’t get hung up on the details too much.
What’s valuable about traffic tracking is that you see your competitor’s web traffic sources and engagement indicators like bounce rates and average visit duration, all of which you can use to improve your own marketing strategy.
Compare SEO performance
SEO is one of the most crucial things you can analyze when comparing your website to your competitors. It drives organic traffic and uncovers effective strategies that resonate with your target audience.
When it comes to SEO, keyword research will give you a fountain of ideas. You have to know which keywords they’re ranking for that you’re missing out on.
Comparing SEO can also uncover gaps in their strategy. They can neglect high-potential keywords, which will give you a great opportunity.
If your competitor is ranking higher than you for a keyword, you will then know that you have to do better and improve on it.
Backlink profile is another great area to explore. Assess your competitor’s backlinks to find ideas for potential backlinks. Websites that link to your competitor may want to connect with you as well.
Compare website changes
Changes that your competitor make to their website can tell you a lot about their marketing strategy. You can know your target audience better when you look at their website over time.
This helps you when you are looking to:
- Adjust your value proposition
- Improve conversion rates
Your competitor’s homepage places their value proposition front and center so when they change or reorganize elements of their homepage, it signals a shift as well into how they’re positioning themselves to their audience.
Use these changes to adjust your own positioning. Focus on their homepage, particularly:
- The main benefit they’re marketing
- Who they’re marketing to
- The objections they’re answering with the page
If you want to improve your conversion rate, look at your competitor’s product pages and track the changes they make to them.
- What did they change?
- What did they remove?
- What did they keep?
For instance, they might have reorganized CTA buttons, removed options, and highlighted a different feature or benefit of their product.
Panoramata actually tracks all these changes automatically and gives you snapshots of a company’s homepage, product pages, and even landing pages over time.
That means you don’t have to keep checking your competitor’s websites to monitor these changes. It will be done automatically for you so you don’t have to do it yourself and you save more time.
Panoramata also tracks website changes on mobile, too so you can get a comprehensive view of your competitor’s website. It’s that easy!
Supercharge your growth with competitive analysis
In today’s competitive landscape, regularly comparing your website with competitors is essential for staying ahead. By evaluating key elements like design, content, SEO, and conversion strategies, you can identify areas where your site falls short and opportunities to improve.
Using the right tools, you can gather meaningful insights, make data-driven decisions, and refine your website to attract more traffic and boost conversions.
The process doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Start small by focusing on one or two areas of improvement, and gradually expand your analysis as you grow more confident.
Whether you’re fine-tuning your SEO, speeding up load times, or enhancing user experience, each improvement brings you closer to outperforming your competition.
Remember, competitive analysis is an ongoing practice.
By consistently reviewing your website’s performance and adapting based on what your competitors are doing right, you’ll be better equipped to stay ahead and turn your site into a powerful asset for growth.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How do I start comparing my website with a competitor's?
Start by identifying your competitors and setting an objective for your comparison. You can analyze key areas like design, web traffic, SEO, and user experience to compare. Use tools like Panoramata, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to gather data on both your site and your competitor’s.
2. How often should I compare my website to competitors?
It’s a good idea to perform a competitor analysis every week or when you notice changes in performance, like drops in traffic or rankings. Regular reviews help you stay updated on industry trends and adapt quickly.
3. What tools are best for website comparison?
Tools like Panoramata, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and SimilarWeb provide comprehensive data on traffic, SEO, and backlinks.
