It’s good to get a second opinion.
It’s hard to see things objectively, especially when you’re very close to it for a very long time. Marketing is one of those things.
It’s good to get an outside perspective, especially one that has a lot of knowledge. AI is one of those perspectives.
In the next few minutes, you’ll learn how to use AI to examine your own marketing with an unflinching eye. We’ll show you how to use an AI chatbot to compare your brand to your competitors. We’ll do three different types of AI competitive analysis.
SEO and keyword analysis (using a keyword gap report)
Website and content marketing analysis (using the sitemap.xml file)
Messaging and positioning analysis (using screenshots of homepages)
So, a little bit of everything. First, here’s a video that walks through everything…
1. Give AI your competitor’s search rankings
SEO and keyword competitive analysis
For this next method, we’ll use an SEO tool to generate a ranking report, then we’ll give it to AI to make recommendations based on the data. We’ll use a report that compares the keyword rankings of our homepage to the keyword rankings of our competitors’ homepages.
Several SEO tools that have these kinds of competitive analysis reports. Semrush has the “Keyword Gap” report. Ahrefs has a “Content Gap” report. I’ll use Semrush in this example. It has a cool venn diagram that I like.
Here’s what it looks like. You just enter your site, select “Exact URL” so it’s limited to your homepage. Add your competitors. Filter to remove the information intent keyphrases and any irrelevant keyphrases (i.e. “jobs”) and click the Export button.
Open the file and remove any obviously irrelevant rows and columns. A little manual clean-up can make a big difference in the out.
Here you can see I remove everything but search volume, keyword difficulty and CPC. I also renamed the column headers. The final file doesn’t have anything that would distract or confuse the AI.
Next, just upload the file along with this competitor analysis prompt:
You are an SEO expert, skilled at using keyword and ranking data to conduct competitive analysis and find practical marketing insights.
I’m giving you a Semrush Keyword Gap report, which compares the keyword rankings of your brand to three competitors. It shows the search volume, keyword difficulty and CPC for each keyword.
Your goal is to help your brand’s homepage rank for more of the phrases it does not yet rank for, but the competitors do.
Conduct an SEO competitive analysis, which includes a list of the additional commercial intent keyphrases are the best opportunities. Make specific, data-driven recommendations.
In the response, the AI breaks down the steps for the competitive analysis. It filters the data and defines criteria for selecting keywords. Then it suggests new keywords for our homepage. Every phrase is high-intent and we rank for none of them. It’s a list of big-prize battles we are losing.
Finally, AI makes SEO recommendations. Some of them are good; others are irrelevant. But a few are very good. To take action on the recommendations, you can even have AI write new keyphrase focused sections for your homepage.
I’m giving you the company homepage. [insert link, paste in text or upload screenshot]
Write three new paragraphs with subheads that align with the existing copy, but incorporate some of the keyphrases you recommended above. Highlight the keyphrases within the text.
How does it look? Is it on brand? Or a big bowl of copy pasta? Edit carefully.
This method is a fun example of how AI can make your other tools more useful. Anytime you see a report with an export button, give your reports to an AI. Ask it what kinds of analysis it can perform. If the report shows your competition’s marketing performance, do some AI competitive analysis.
2. Give AI your competitor’s sitemap.xml file
Website and content marketing competitive analysis
Every site has a sitemap.xml file. It helps search engine crawlers find all the pages, so it sits there, usually at www.website.com/sitemap.xml, waiting to share information about the size and shape of the website.
There is a lot of information in that little file.
If you give this file to AI (or just tell it where to look) it can instantly glean all kinds of things about a website, just from the number and names of the URLs. If you give it your sitemap file and a competitor’s, it does AI competitive analysis and shares
Number and types of pages
Differences in service offerings and niches
Use of formats such as case studies, webinars, whitepapers, etc.
Size and topical focus of the content marketing program
Local focus and geography
It’s a very broad analysis from a very small file. This analysis takes less than one minute and costs nothing.
Here is the competitive analysis prompt:
You are a digital marketing strategist, highly skilled in detailed competitive analysis based on website structure.
I’m giving you two sitemaps:
(Link to your sitemap)
(Link to competitor sitemap)
Perform a competitive analysis that compares and contrasts these two brands in the following ways based on insights gleaned from the sitemaps.
1. Website scope and depth (types of pages, number of service/product pages, differences in categories and niches)
2. Content marketing (number of posts, case studies, formats, categories and topics)
3. Local focus (geographically specific pages)
List strength and gaps of each competitor. Identify untapped opportunities for (your brand).
The response will summarize the differences between the businesses. It’s an instant glimpse into their digital strategy and how it differs from your own. And it’s a view you can’t really get as a human, browsing around their site.
Some of the analysis will be obvious, but look closely. You may find a few valuable insights. Some of the recommendations will be overly broad, but don’t be too dismissive. Ask the AI for more specific input and strategies
This is also a good time to ask for a visual. Who has more of what kinds of pages? Who has more posts? More case studies? Ask AI to draw you a barchart.
Create a bar chart comparing the number of pages of various types on the two websites.
Here’s the barchart that AI drew after comparing my sitemap to the sitemap of a competitor. The first one was small, so I asked it to expand on the categories.
Look closely and you’ll see an SEO strategy. The insights are clear: I should make more industry pages and geographically specific pages. Also, I might need more case studies.
Corey Northcutt, Chief Optimization Officer, Orbit Media
“On large enterprise sites especially, make sure you’re considering all the domain names that you own! It’s common to re-launch a large corporate site perfectly, only to forget dozens of other domain names accumulated through M&A and adjacent marketing campaigns that no longer redirect properly. It’s also oddly rare that marketing is kept up to speed on the full inventory of these assets.”
3. Give AI your competitor’s homepage
Messaging and positioning competitive analysis
Writing a homepage is one of the all-time great marketing challenges. More than any other URL, it needs to encapsulate the brand and messaging.
Give AI two homepages of brands in the same vertical and it will compare their messaging. It will contrast how the two brands position themselves in the market. It won’t be perfect, but it will definitely be interesting.
We’ll give the AI full-page screenshots of the homepages. This is one of three ways to give AI a page, and it’s the right approach right for this method. AI will see (and not just read) the page, so visual elements (images, trust seals, etc.) will be included in the audit.
To get the full-page screenshot, use a Chrome extension such as GoFullPage. Or get Snagit by Techsmith which is a power tool for screenshots and markup. I use it daily.
Grab screenshots of your homepage and several competitors. Then upload them all to your favorite LLM along with this prompt. Note: if you use ChatGPT, you’ll need the “Plus” account to upload images.
You are a brand messaging and positioning expert, skilled at understanding the position of a brand within a market based on the homepage of that brand.
I’m giving you two home pages of brands in [industry vertical]. Compare and contrast the messaging and positioning of these two brands. Identify the key themes of the positioning of each. Include a detailed but concise summary.
You may be surprised at how fast and accurate the market positioning analysis is.
But really we should have AI compare the messaging in the context of the target audience, because the differences really only matter in the mind of your prospect.
For this next prompt, you’ll need to upload your persona or ICP (ideal client profile). If you don’t have that handy, you can quickly generate one with an AI persona prompt.
Use the same conversation with the AI, so it already has the homepage screenshots. Upload a PDF of your persona along with the following prompt:
Now I’m giving you a persona. Create a table showing the extent to which the messaging of each of these brands aligns with the information needs of this persona.
In the left column, list the personas prioritized information needs. Create a column for each brand on the right. Within the cells under those columns, rate the extent to which the messaging aligns with the personas interests and concerns.
[Attach persona]
Now you can see the comparison in the context of your prospect. If the persona is accurate and the homepages really do reflect the brand’s messaging, the summary will be useful.
In this example, the AI used star reviews.
If your prospect is likely to look at several sites (maybe they’re clicking through various search results?) you can give them all to the AI for broader competitor research. Here’s a prompt that expands the competitive landscape in the analysis.
I’m giving you two more homepages. Create a color coded heatmap showing the extent to which the messaging of all four of these brands aligns or does not align with the questions and concerns of the persona.
The output should show that your brand does the best job of speaking to the persona. Here’s what I got when I gave the AI my homepage, my persona and the homepage for three competitors:
If one of your competitors’ homepage messaging aligns better with the needs of your persona, use this guide for homepages and let this analysis guide the strategic decisions about your messaging.
All is fair in love and marketing
Competitive analysis is best done by a skilled, human marketing strategist. But artificial intelligence is good for quick competitive intelligence (and all kinds of market research) for several reasons. It’s good at this kind of market research because:
It understands language (brand messaging)
It can process large amounts of data
It has a fresh, unemotional perspective
We can’t see our competitors’ Analytics or sales reports, but we can see their marketing messages, their sitemap file and their search rankings. It’s a good start.
AI is one of the best competitor analysis tools for quick insights if you have the right prompts. And now you have the prompts. Go get the insights!