How to Do a Competitor Analysis (With Free Template)

A competitor analysis is a structured comparison of your product, pricing, positioning, and market presence against every brand a real buyer would consider alongside yours. Done well, it covers ten broad areas: business model, product, pricing, marketing, channels, customer reviews, content, operations, talent, and strategic moves, though most teams get real value focusing on the five or six that actually shape buying decisions in their category. This guide walks through the full process step by step, and includes a free template built to run the whole analysis in one workbook rather than five disconnected documents.

Get the free template

The template built for this guide is a seven-tab Excel workbook: Competitor Overview, Feature Comparison, Pricing Comparison, SWOT, Share of Voice Tracker, Content and Keyword Gaps, and Review and Social Snapshot. Yellow-shaded cells mark where to enter your own data, and the share of voice tab calculates percentages automatically from raw mention counts. Enter your email below and we’ll send it straight to your inbox, then make your own copy and work through the seven steps below in order, filling in the matching tab as you go.

Step 1: identify your real competitor set

Start with direct competitors, brands selling essentially the same product to the same buyer. Then add indirect competitors: the cheaper substitute, the adjacent tool a buyer might stretch to cover the same need, the manual process or spreadsheet a smaller prospect might choose over any paid tool at all. Leaving indirect competitors off the list is the single most common gap in an otherwise thorough analysis, since the buyer choosing between your product and a spreadsheet is a real, losable deal even though the spreadsheet never shows up in a traditional competitor search.

Aim for four to six competitors on the working list. Fewer than that misses real alternatives; more than that spreads research too thin to go deep on any one of them. Log each one in the Competitor Overview tab with their category, target audience, and core value proposition before moving to the next step.

Step 2: compare product and features

Build a feature list from your own product's core functions, then score each competitor against it: yes, no, partial, or a simple 1-to-5 scale if that fits the comparison better. The goal is not counting who has the most checkmarks. It is spotting the specific gaps, features you have that nobody else does, and features everybody else has that you are missing, since both are strategically useful in different ways.

Pull this directly from product pages, public documentation, and free trials where available rather than relying on secondhand comparison articles, which are often outdated or written by an affiliate with a reason to favor one tool. The Feature Comparison tab in the template has room for four competitors alongside your own brand.

Step 3: compare pricing honestly

Pricing pages change often, and the number a competitor advertises rarely tells the full story on its own. Log the entry plan price alongside its actual limits, seat count, usage cap, or feature restrictions, since a low headline price paired with a tight cap can end up costing more once a team scales past it. For competitors with no public pricing, note that explicitly rather than leaving the cell blank, since the absence of a published price is itself a useful data point about how that company sells.

Record the date checked next to every price. Pricing data has a short shelf life in most categories, and a stale number in a comparison deck is worse than an honest "not yet verified" flag.

Step 4: run a SWOT per competitor

A SWOT works best as the fourth step rather than the first, since strengths and weaknesses are much easier to state accurately once the feature and pricing data is already sitting in front of you. Fill in strengths and weaknesses for each competitor based on what steps 2 and 3 actually revealed, not a general impression from memory. Then flip the lens: opportunities are the gaps your brand can exploit, and threats are the specific moves a competitor could make that would hurt you.

A SWOT built without the underlying data tends to drift toward vague, defensible-sounding statements that don't actually inform a decision. "Strong brand" is not useful on its own. "Strong brand, evidenced by a 4.6 average review rating across 3,200 reviews" is.

Step 5: measure share of voice and sentiment

Pricing and features describe what a competitor offers. Share of voice and sentiment describe how much of the actual conversation they own, and how people feel about them once they're using the product. Both require ongoing mention tracking rather than a one-time pull, since a single snapshot can be skewed by a recent launch or a passing news cycle in either direction.

The template's Share of Voice Tracker tab handles the calculation automatically: enter raw mention counts per brand and the percentage formula runs itself. For the fuller methodology, including weighting and AI answer engines, see our full calculation guide. Automated competitor tracking pulls these numbers continuously instead of requiring a manual pull every time the analysis needs a refresh.

Step 6: find content and keyword gaps

Identify the keywords and topics a competitor ranks for that your own content doesn't cover yet. This step matters most for search-driven categories, but it applies to any content-heavy channel, a competitor's YouTube library or newsletter archive works the same way. List the keyword or topic, note where the competitor ranks, where you currently stand, and a rough priority based on estimated search volume and how closely the topic maps to your actual buyer.

This tab tends to be the most actionable one in the whole workbook, since it converts directly into a content calendar rather than staying a static reference document nobody revisits.

Step 7: check reviews and social presence

A competitor's own marketing describes the product they want to sell. Review platforms describe the product customers actually got, which is not always the same thing. Log the average rating, review count, and follower counts across the platforms your buyers actually check before purchasing, G2 or Capterra for B2B software, Trustpilot or app store ratings for consumer products.

Review monitoring that tracks this continuously rather than as a quarterly manual pull catches a competitor's reputation shift, positive or negative, closer to when it happens rather than three months after the fact.

Keeping the analysis current

A competitor analysis is a snapshot the day it's finished and a stale document three months later if nobody revisits it. Set a quarterly calendar reminder to re-run steps 2 and 3 at minimum, since pricing and features shift the fastest of everything in this workbook. Share of voice and review data benefit from more frequent, lighter-touch checks, since those numbers move continuously rather than on a competitor's own release schedule.

Agencies running this process across multiple client accounts should standardize the workbook structure once and reuse it everywhere, since consistent reporting across accounts saves real time versus rebuilding a comparison framework from scratch for every client engagement.

Common mistakes

• Only tracking obvious direct competitors. The cheaper substitute or the do-it-yourself alternative is a real competitor for a meaningful share of deals, even when it never shows up in a head-to-head comparison search.
• Treating the analysis as a one-time project. A workbook filled in once and never revisited is worth less by the quarter as pricing, features, and messaging move on without it.
• Writing a SWOT before gathering the underlying data. Strengths and weaknesses based on impression rather than evidence tend to be vague enough that they don't actually change a decision.
• Skipping review and social data entirely. Pricing and feature pages show intent. Reviews show outcome, and the gap between the two is often where the most useful insight sits.
• Building five separate documents instead of one workbook. A pricing doc here, a SWOT deck there, and a keyword spreadsheet somewhere else makes the analysis harder to maintain and easier to quietly abandon.

Frequently asked questions

A competitor analysis is only as useful as the evidence sitting underneath it. Download the template, work through the seven steps in order, and set the quarterly reminder before you close the workbook the first time. That single habit separates a document people actually use from one that quietly goes stale in a shared drive nobody opens again.