In all commercial fields, it’s important to know your market in order to better position your products or services. This is particularly true for the online part of any business, as it’s easy to see what’s going on in the competition.

Whether for a new site or a redesign, analyzing what your competition is doing can be a source of information that will give you a definite advantage in growing your site.

Why audit your competition?

There are many reasons to audit your competitors’ websites:

• Identify the keywords used by your competitors and their successes.
• Understand how their most popular pages are structured.
• Analyze the content of your competitors’ popular pages.
• Find out which sites link to your competitors.
• Understand your competitors’ use of social media.
• Identify your competitors’ technical and strategic mistakes.

All this information will help you improve every aspect of your website’s design.