Competitor Analysis: A Real-World Worked Example

A competitor analysis is a structured assessment of how your rivals position themselves, where they invest, and what that tells you about the market you are competing in. Done well, it gives you a commercial picture of the competitive landscape, not just a list of features and prices.

This article walks through a worked example using a fictional but realistic B2B SaaS business, showing exactly what to look at, how to interpret it, and what decisions it should inform. The goal is to make the process concrete rather than theoretical.

What Does a Competitor Analysis Actually Include?

The term gets used loosely. I have seen competitor analyses that are nothing more than a side-by-side pricing table, and I have seen 80-page decks that took three weeks to produce and were out of date before anyone read them. Neither extreme is useful.

A functional competitor analysis covers five areas: positioning and messaging, search behaviour (paid and organic), content and SEO footprint, product and pricing signals, and social presence. You do not need to go equally deep on all five. The depth should match the decision you are trying to make.

When I was running agencies, the most useful competitive work we did was always tied to a specific commercial question. Are we losing ground on certain search terms? Is a competitor moving into our core segment? Are their conversion rates improving? Framing the analysis around a question stops it becoming a general-purpose document that sits in a shared drive.

If you want broader context on how competitive intelligence fits into a research programme, the Market Research and Competitive Intel hub covers the full landscape, from tool selection to monitoring frameworks.

The Scenario: A B2B SaaS Business in the Project Management Space

For this worked example, the business is called Clearflow. It is a project management platform targeting professional services firms with 50 to 500 employees. Its main competitors are three established players: one enterprise-focused, one SMB-focused, and one that has recently pivoted toward the same mid-market segment Clearflow occupies.

The question driving the analysis is specific: the mid-market competitor, call them Orbis, has been growing fast and Clearflow’s sales team is reporting that Orbis keeps coming up in late-stage deals. The business needs to understand what Orbis is doing and whether Clearflow’s positioning is holding up.

That is the right kind of brief. It has a commercial context, a named competitor, and a clear output requirement. It is not “tell us everything about the market.”

Step One: Positioning and Messaging Analysis

Start with the homepage and the primary landing pages. Not to copy them, but to understand what story the competitor is telling and who they are telling it to.

Orbis’s homepage leads with “Built for teams that bill by the hour.” That is a specific, commercially grounded message aimed at professional services. It is not a generic productivity claim. Their hero section includes a screenshot of a timesheet integration, which tells you something about what their customers care about most.

Clearflow’s homepage, by comparison, leads with “Project management that works the way you do.” That is a positioning statement that could apply to almost any business. It does not speak to professional services, billing, or the specific pain points of the segment both companies are competing for.

This is the most common positioning failure I see. Businesses write for the broadest possible audience because narrowing feels like leaving money on the table. In practice, specificity wins. When I was at iProspect and we were pitching against larger networks, the briefs we won were almost always the ones where we had a specific, credible point of view on the client’s sector. The briefs we lost were the ones where we tried to be everything to everyone.

Document what Orbis is claiming, what they are not claiming, and what the gap is. In this case, Clearflow is not owning the professional services message even though that is their core segment. Orbis is.

Step Two: Paid Search Behaviour

Paid search is one of the most honest signals in competitive intelligence. Businesses spend real money on it, which means the terms they bid on reflect genuine commercial intent, not aspirational positioning. If a competitor is bidding on a keyword, they believe there is revenue attached to it.

Using a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs, pull the paid keyword data for Orbis. Look at three things: which terms they are bidding on, which terms they are not bidding on, and what their ad copy says.

In this example, Orbis is bidding heavily on terms like “project management for consultancies,” “timesheet software for agencies,” and “billing software for professional services.” They are not bidding on generic terms like “project management software,” which tells you they have made a deliberate choice to go narrow rather than compete on volume.

Their ad copy consistently references a free trial, a 14-day onboarding guarantee, and integration with accounting platforms. That last point is significant. It suggests their customers care about connecting project management to invoicing, which is a professional services pain point that Clearflow is not addressing in their messaging.

I ran paid search campaigns across dozens of verticals during my time managing large-scale performance programmes, and the ad copy a competitor runs in a competitive auction tells you more about their customer insight than almost anything else. They have tested that copy. It converts. Take it seriously.

Step Three: Organic Search and Content Footprint

Organic search tells you where a competitor is investing for the long term. It takes time and money to build an organic presence, so the topics a competitor has prioritised in their content strategy reflect a considered bet on where their audience is and what they care about.

Pull Orbis’s top organic pages by traffic. In this example, their highest-performing content includes a guide to project profitability for agencies, a comparison piece between timesheet tracking methods, and a calculator tool for estimating billing rate benchmarks. None of this is generic project management content. All of it is built for a professional services reader.

Look at the internal linking structure as well. How pages link to each other tells you which content the business considers most commercially important. A well-structured internal linking architecture, where supporting content feeds authority toward conversion pages, is a sign of a mature content programme. Clearflow’s site, in this example, has a blog with broadly useful project management content but no clear topical authority around professional services.

One thing worth noting: organic traffic estimates from third-party tools are approximations. I have seen cases where a tool showed a competitor performing strongly on a term and the actual traffic was a fraction of the estimate. Use the data directionally, not as precise measurement. Third-party tools introduce their own distortions, and competitive intelligence is no different. The pattern matters more than the specific number.

Step Four: Social Presence and Engagement Signals

Social is a weaker signal than search for most B2B businesses, but it is still worth a pass. What you are looking for is not follower counts. You are looking at what content generates genuine engagement, what their community looks like, and whether they are investing in social as a channel or just maintaining a presence.

In this example, Orbis has a modest LinkedIn following but consistently high engagement on posts that feature customer stories from agency owners. Their comments section includes names of real people at real firms. That is a sign of an active customer community, not a vanity metric.

Tools like Sprout Social’s CRM features can help track competitor social activity at scale if you are monitoring multiple players over time. For a one-off analysis, manual review is sufficient.

What Orbis is not doing is worth noting too. They have no YouTube presence, no podcast, and no significant investment in visual content formats. That is either a gap or a deliberate choice. Given their focus and the nature of their audience, it looks deliberate. Professional services buyers are not watching explainer videos. They are reading case studies and talking to peers.

Step Five: Product and Pricing Signals

You cannot always see a competitor’s pricing, but you can often infer it. Pricing pages, even when they say “contact us,” tell you something about how a business segments its customers. Whether they lead with a free tier, a per-seat model, or an enterprise quote tells you about their go-to-market motion.

Orbis has three tiers. The entry tier is priced for small teams and has a 30-day free trial. The mid tier is where their professional services features sit, and the enterprise tier requires a conversation. That structure tells you they are using the free tier to acquire and the mid tier to convert. The enterprise tier is a signal they are testing upmarket without committing to it.

Review sites like G2 and Capterra are useful here. Not for the overall rating, but for the specific complaints. What do Orbis customers say they wish the product did? What do churned customers cite as their reason for leaving? In this example, the recurring themes in negative reviews are around reporting depth and customer support response times. Both are potential differentiation points for Clearflow.

I used to tell the teams I worked with that a competitor’s one-star reviews are worth more than their marketing copy. The copy tells you what they want you to believe. The reviews tell you what customers actually experience.

How to Turn the Analysis Into a Point of View

This is where most competitor analyses fall apart. They describe the landscape accurately and then stop. The output is a collection of observations with no conclusions. That is not useful to a marketing team or a leadership team trying to make decisions.

The observations in this example point to three clear conclusions for Clearflow:

First, Clearflow is not owning its own segment. Orbis has taken the professional services positioning and is executing it consistently across paid search, organic content, social, and product messaging. Clearflow’s generic positioning is leaving space for Orbis to define the category on their terms.

Second, there is a specific gap in reporting and support. Orbis’s negative reviews cluster around these two areas. Clearflow should be actively promoting its reporting depth and its support model in sales conversations and marketing materials, particularly when Orbis is in the deal.

Third, the billing and invoicing integration angle is underexploited. Orbis is leading with it in paid search. Clearflow should assess whether they have a credible story to tell in this area and, if so, build it into their messaging immediately.

Those are actionable conclusions. They point to specific changes in positioning, messaging, and sales enablement. That is what a competitor analysis should produce.

When I judged the Effie Awards, the entries that stood out were never the ones with the most impressive data. They were the ones where the team had taken a clear-eyed view of the competitive situation and made a deliberate, confident choice about how to respond. Competitor analysis is only as valuable as the decisions it enables.

What to Do With the Output

A competitor analysis is not a one-time document. The market moves. Competitors change their messaging, shift their spend, launch new products, and enter new segments. The analysis you do today has a shelf life.

Build a lightweight monitoring process alongside the initial deep dive. Set up alerts for competitor brand mentions, track their paid search activity quarterly, and revisit their organic content footprint every six months. The goal is not comprehensive surveillance. It is staying close enough to notice when something meaningful changes.

Share the findings in a format that different stakeholders can use. Sales needs the positioning gaps and the objection-handling implications. Product needs the feature gap and review data. Marketing needs the messaging and channel insights. A single 40-page deck serves none of them well. A one-page summary with three clear conclusions and a set of supporting appendices serves all of them.

The Market Research and Competitive Intel hub has more on how to structure ongoing monitoring programmes and which tools are worth the investment at different stages of a business.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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