Understanding what your competitors are doing is vital to dominating your market. The main point of competitor analysis is to find out what your competitors are doing well and what they aren’t.
Practically competitor analysis usually requires sorting through a bulk of competitor data over the internet. No competitor brand wants to be spied on or analyzed by another competitor. So, they mostly put measures in place to detect and block you from accessing their page.
You can evade most of these barriers on your competitor sites and search engines by using dedicated residential proxies. When researching your competitors, you need to be as anonymous as possible. You do not want your competitors to identify and restrict you from accessing their websites.
An Overview of Competitor Analysis
A competitive analysis is an approach you use to evaluate your business’s performance against other companies selling similar products or rendering similar services in your niche. Anonymous competitor analysis helps you achieve the following:.
- Understand your market: You may know many of your competitors, but you can’t tell much about them without analyzing them. More importantly, you can’t objectively identify who your key competitors and indirect competitors are.
Also, understanding your market is an ongoing process as you also need to identify new entrants into the market. Understanding your key competitors is one of the primary keys to success in your industry.
- Competitor Research and analysis help you identify your strengths and weaknesses:
After extensively analyzing your competitors’ model, you will quickly identify your unique selling point (USP) and press home that advantage. On the other hand, when you determine your weakness, you can understudy your competitors to get insights into how to improve your products or service.
- Evaluate current trends in your market:
Part of what your competitor research should aim to achieve is examining what new or improved products and features your competitors are offering to gain a competitive edge.
When you constantly evaluate your competitor’s behaviors and actions, you can quickly determine the current or emerging trend in that market space and upgrade your brand.
- Make plans for your brand:
Competitor research gives you knowledge on what you need to do to grow. It also gives you an insight into prioritizing your activities to get there. You can easily create a success road map when you understand what to do in your business and when to do it.
How Can Proxies Help Your Competitor’s Analysis?
Proxies are IP addresses that help mask your device’s IP address while surfing the internet. In simpler terms, proxies act as an intermediary between your device and your target website. If you want to use a proxy, connect to the proxy server before accessing the internet. This grants you secure and anonymous access to the internet.
Since you are using a proxy for competitor analysis, you are strongly encouraged to use a private proxy to ensure a secure and reliable connection. You will need the proxy to access a wide variety of your competitors’ websites and online products and services. So let’s discuss how proxies can help you do your competitor analysis.
Secure Access to the Internet
The first thing you want to ensure is security. As the saying goes, “safety first.” Competitor research would require surfing through lots of web pages to extract data. Accessing the internet is a risk on its own; using the internet to search through multiple web pages with unknown sources is even more dangerous.
Proxies shield your company device and data from the risk associated with using the internet. It works as a barrier between your local machine and the web servers you access. Additionally, a proxy can protect you from data breaches and cybersecurity issues.
Research Competitors Despite Geo-Location Constraints
Due to location constraints, you might not have access to some of your indirect competitors’ web content.
For example, an American-based fin-tech company might not allow users from specific geographic locations to access their service. On the other hand, you have a similar service you want to serve people in that restricted geographic location. You must access the company’s site and service as part of your competitor’s research process.
You won’t experience such restrictions if you use a residential IP address with the location being an area they grant access to.
Web Scraping
Web scraping is an essential aspect of competitor analysis. It allows you to scrape competitors’ web pages on a large scale to get information about their products and service listing, features, and categories. It is also helpful in detecting the latest trend in your market.
Besides providing information on your competitor’s pricing, web scraping lets you track your competitors’ strategies in real-time.
Web scraping often involves sorting through hundreds, even thousands of competitor web pages and accessing a wide variety of competitor data. As such, it is difficult (sometimes impossible) to carry out this process manually.
Web scraping is an automated data extraction process that enables you to identify, scrap and save specific data from competitors’ web pages using scrapers.
In simple terms, it is a bot. When search engines or competitor web pages detect the use of bots on their platform, they respond immediately by restricting your IP address from accessing the webpage.
This is where you need proxies. Proxies make the search engines believe that real humans are accessing their web pages instead of bots. In a nutshell, proxies enable the use of web scrapers for competitor analysis.
SEO and Keyword Research
SEO is not as complicated as people imagine it to be. And your competitors can be your greatest ally. Competitor analysis involves getting insights on what content your potential market likes from competitors already doing well in that area. The heart of this process is called keyword research.
Performing keyword research without proxies may put you at risk of getting your IP address blocked. Since we don’t want that to happen, using keyword research is necessary. Proxies help you analyze the SEO strategies your competitors use.
Use Proxy to Save Time and Bandwidth
As you perform competitor research, you will need to highlight 5-10 competitor websites to which you want to pay the closest attention to.
Proxies support web caching. Whatever page you have previously loaded on the proxy server can quickly be returned from the proxy server when you need it next. Such a page will load faster without compromising your bandwidth.
Hide Your Business Identity During Your Research
While researching your competitors, you want to be as anonymous as possible. An exposed IP address makes it easy for you to be discovered. Proxies help keep you anonymous and make it difficult for competitors to predict your next move.
Analyze Social Media Presence
Analyzing how competitors use social media to interact with their clients is a significant part of competitor market analysis. Social media is one of the best ways companies use to tell the world how they are faring and how they are developing.
A comprehensive social media competitor analysis sometimes involves opening multiple social media accounts on the same platform. But when these social media platforms detect numerous accounts connected to a single IP address, they tend to restrict such accounts. Proxies can help you open multiple accounts without your account being banned or restricted.
Losing your social media account comes at the cost of losing your followers (potential customers).Therefore, investing in private proxies for competitor analysis on social media is essential.
Conclusion
Proxies are an effective solution to roadblocks you might experience with competitors. It aids the concealment of your business identity and enables you to conduct competitor analysis in a secure internet environment. It helps you break geographical barriers and access geo-restricted materials.
