Stop Optimizing Your Marketing Strategies in the Dark
CMOs and marketing team leads for B2B organizations often find themselves facing the same issue: You’ve increased your budgets and you feel like you’re doing all you can, but it’s still not moving the needle. The truth is, you may have forgotten the elephant in the room – your competition.
Rather than asking yourself what more you could be doing, look at what your competitors are doing better.
If tracking competitor performance isn’t already a regular part of your B2B digital marketing strategy, it’s time to integrate it into every facet. With proper attention, competitor audits give you an edge on every other aspect of your marketing, including SEO and onsite optimization, paid search and social media, and general brand awareness across digital channels.
Download our competitive research checklist to get jumpstart ahead of your rivals!
B2B SEO Competitor Analysis
Start Winning Rankings You Don’t Know You’re Losing
Have you been overlooking your competition’s SEO strategy? Regularly checking your competitors’ websites and rankings for fluctuations and improvements should be a cornerstone of your strategic approach. If it’s not, here are some good places to start integrating it.
The hidden keyword gap
Most B2B companies audit their own SEO and have a broad understanding of how they fare in traditional search landscapes. However, fewer conduct a competitor analysis and perform keyword research to see how other companies perform. Skipping that step is a mistake. Often, you’ll find your direct competitors ranking for high-intent terms you may have never targeted – and that you’d never have known about otherwise. You may even unearth additional, indirect competitors you hadn’t previously considered.
Keeping an eye on other organizations in your industry can highlight serious keyword and content gaps, as well as perceived differences in topical authority. You can also spot their strengths and weaknesses — topics where competitors historically outperform you in search engines, or topics they’re trying to pursue without much success.
On-page and technical signals
Good SEO doesn’t stop at keyword research. You need to take into account all on-page factors that add up to your competitors’ successes or failures. For example, you may realize that your competitors have been earning more authority by committing to a deeper, more thorough content strategy on specific topics. They may have a more technically sound site or follow a more robust internal linking strategy than your site does. Or you might find that their site loads faster and has a more extensive schema markup and structured content footprint.
If you’re not checking regularly, these small and easy-to-miss factors can compound over time, leaving you baffled when you see competitors succeeding where you haven’t been.
Backlink profiles and domain authority
When it comes to B2B digital marketing strategies, the competition has often done the groundwork for you. And backlink profiles are one of the best arguments for not trying to reinvent the wheel.
Can you find your competitors’ backlinks? Are they earning valuable links where you aren’t? Great! You now have a roadmap for building out some links of your own by reaching out to industry publications and seeking out thought leadership placements on sites like Wikipedia. With some diligence and truly helpful content, you may be able to land a high-authority backlink.
The risk of inaction
Without competitive SEO benchmarking, you’re only optimizing against your own past performance – not against the market reality your buyers are actually experiencing. Nor do you understand how your rivals are maneuvering to keep up with market shifts. You can also close yourself off from trends that you could otherwise harness to your advantage and use to drive more website traffic.
B2B Paid Search & Social Media Competitive Analysis
Stop Spending More to Compete Against a Playbook You’ve Never Read
Are you increasing your advertising budget without ever looking at what your competitors are actually running? Regularly analyzing their ad strategies across paid search and social should be a significant part of how you manage your marketing. If it isn’t, here’s where to start.
Search advertising and Auction Insights
Most B2B strategists have a handle on their own Google and Microsoft Ads performance. Fewer pay close attention to what competitors are running alongside them. PPC ad copy, offers, and landing pages can reveal what’s connecting with your shared audience and what isn’t, while bidding strategy shows where competitors are investing and where they’re pulling back. Auction Insights provides data on who is actively bidding on your branded terms and who is competing for the same search queries. iThe platform also includes impression share data – and that is worth paying close attention to.
If your numbers aren’t where they should be, the issue may not be budget at all. It may be that a competitor has stronger copy, a more compelling offer, or a better landing page experience, and that’s a strategy problem worth solving. You may even discover a competitor you weren’t aware of, as an unfamiliar company bidding on your brand name is often the first sign that competition in your industry is growing.
B2B social advertising and Ad Libraries
Paid social advertising, and LinkedIn in particular, surfaces things paid search simply can’t. LinkedIn’s Ad Library gives you a direct look into what any company is actively running, including the ad formats they’re using, the creative they’re testing, and the messages they’re putting in front of their audience. Are they running thought-leadership content or pushing products or services? Video or static images?
You can also get a sense of who they’re targeting. LinkedIn will sometimes surface demographic information alongside active ads, including locations and audience categories, which can reveal a lot about who competitors are actually trying to reach. Whether that shows up in the data or in the creative itself, knowing which roles, industries, offerings, or funnel stages they’re prioritizing provides useful context when considering how you should use the platform.
Brand awareness and retargeting
It’s easy to assume your paid strategy is solid when your bottom-funnel numbers look decent. But if competitors are dominating top-of-funnel awareness while your marketing efforts are concentrated at the bottom of the funnel, your rivals may already be shaping buyer preferences before your ads ever enter the picture. Brand repetition plays a bigger role than most teams give it credit for, and it matters more than ever when buyers are searching by name or encountering brands through AI-generated recommendations where familiarity can drive clicks.
A lot of this is visible if you know where to look. Visit competitors’ websites and see if their ads start following you across platforms. Search top-of-funnel terms in your industry and note who shows up consistently. Auction Insights and Keyword Planner can fill in the gaps. The sooner you gain insight into where competitors are building that presence, the sooner you can close the gap. If you’re not tracking it, you’re making budget decisions without the full picture.
The risk of inaction
Paid media budgets are too significant to allocate based on internal intuition alone. Without insight into what your competitors are doing, you may be outbid, outmessaged, or simply out-positioned — and never know why conversion rates are underperforming.
B2B Brand Awareness & General Market Analysis
Quit Losing the Perception Battle Before Buyers Ever Reach You
One of the trickiest components of B2B digital marketing is the importance of brand awareness – and how far divorced it can seem from your bottom-of-funnel indicators. Knowing who’s dominating the spaces where your buyers are forming their opinions is invaluable.
Share of voice and digital footprint
At a broad level, seek to understand where your competitors enter into the conversation. Where are buyers first hearing about them? Especially in niche B2B markets, it’s tempting to say “word of mouth” and leave that assumption unquestioned. But where does that word of mouth originate?
To find out, check out where competitors appear in the press and when they garner industry awards. Maybe their C suite has appeared on podcasts, or they’ve been guest posting on other sites. Or perhaps they’ve secured speaking engagements at industry events or other thought leadership platforms. All of these venues expand their footprint beyond their owned media and expose them to new audiences.
Content marketing and topic ownership
We touched on this idea in the SEO section, but it bears further exploration: You need to know where your competitors are building authority and how their actions could siphon away your future pipeline.
Examine what topics they’re consistently publishing about and what areas of the conversation they seem to own. These findings can highlight the topics customers really care about and which topics your rivals have deemed important to their funnel. Performing a solid content gap analysis also exposes which conversations you’re absent from, making it easier to determine if you should start building authority on a new, relevant topic.
Social presence and community building
There may also be a gap between you and your competitors in organic social engagement and community building. While this isn’t always a huge factor in niche B2B markets, all kinds of visibility help shape brand perception among decision-makers.
Make a note of what kind of tone other organizations are using and how they position themselves toward your overlapping audiences, both on and off their sites.
Search-adjacent brand signals
It’s not only about the platforms and accounts your rivals run. Check out review sites, industry directories, and analyst mentions to better understand how your B2B buyers are perceiving and evaluating vendors during the research phase.
The risk of inaction
By the time a prospect reaches your sales team, they’ve often already formed a vendor shortlist. And their opinions have been shaped entirely by awareness touchpoints you weren’t present for.
Conclusion: Stop Optimizing in Isolation
More than just a missed opportunity, skipping out on digital marketing competitor analysis can mean that you’re being outmaneuvered while being completely unaware of it! Plus, you’re missing out on the time and money you save by seeing what’s already been working for others in your industry.
Get a clearer picture of how you should approach your SEO, paid media, and brand strategy in a way only competitor research can. And if you need some help getting a clearer understanding of the landscape, let our team at Upward Engine know.
