Scoring grid: evaluate a competitor's landing page in 20 minutes

You've identified your competitors' landing pages — our guide to finding them and our competitive analysis article cover that step. What remains is the useful work: evaluating them seriously. Without a method, the eye gets grabbed by the design and the analysis stops at an impression. The solution is the same one usability professionals have used for thirty years: a systematic inspection, criterion by criterion. That's the principle of heuristic evaluation formalised by Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich in their founding paper presented at CHI 1990 (“Heuristic Evaluation of User Interfaces”): their work showed that a single evaluator without a grid spots only a fraction of an interface's problems, but that inspection guided by an explicit list of criteria multiplies coverage. The grid below transposes that logic to competitive analysis.

The grid: 7 dimensions, 25 checkpoints

1. Promise and positioning (the what)

• What does the headline promise, in one sentence? If you can't rephrase it after 5 seconds, the page has a problem — or your reading was too quick: redo the 5-second test honestly.
• Who does the page explicitly address? (named segment, trade vocabulary, chosen examples)
• Which angle: price, speed, expertise, proximity, guarantee? Write it down — that's the slot you won't want to occupy twice.
• Is the promise quantified and verifiable, or vague?

2. Structure and journey

• Section order: note the sequence (hero → proof → offer → FAQ…) and compare it to the reference anatomy.
• Length: how many screens? Does the page argue its case or just assert it?
• Is there a navigation menu, or is the page sealed around its conversion?

3. Call to action

• What action is requested (quote, trial, purchase, appointment) and what commitment does it represent?
• How many different CTAs? A single goal or several competing ones?
• The button label: generic (“Submit”) or benefit-driven (“Get my estimate”)?

4. Proof and reassurance

• Inventory: testimonials (named?), logos, numbers, certifications, guarantees.
• Is the proof verifiable or decorative? A “4.9/5” without a source is decorative proof.
• What's missing? The objections the page doesn't handle are your openings.

5. Form and friction

• Number of fields, sensitive fields (phone?), one step or several.
• What happens after submission? Actually do it if it's commitment-free: the thank-you page and follow-up email are part of the competitor's experience.
• Their first callback delay — precious information about their sales organisation.

6. Technical and mobile

• Load speed (test on mobile over 4G, not on your fibre connection).
• Mobile rendering quality: was the page designed mobile-first or just shrunk?
• Visible SEO: title, meta description, structured data (stars or FAQ in Google results?).

7. Acquisition (where their traffic comes from)

• Is the page indexed and ranking on queries (search its exact title on Google)?
• Is the competitor advertising on it? The Meta Ad Library and the Google Ads Transparency Center will tell you for free.
• Do the ads and the page tell the same story (message match)? Inconsistencies are exploitable weaknesses.

Turning notes into decisions

Fill in the grid for three to five competitors — beyond that, the lessons repeat — in a simple spreadsheet, one column per competitor. Three readings come out of it. The vertical reading: each competitor's column reveals their strategy (the one promising speed, the one crushing with social proof, the one undercutting on price). The horizontal reading: a row where everyone is strong is a market standard to match, not a differentiator; a row where everyone is weak is your opening. And the reading of absences, the most valuable: the objection nobody handles, the segment nobody addresses, the guarantee nobody dares to give. That's where a positioning is built — not in copying the leader.

The two traps of the exercise

First trap: concluding that what the competitor does works. You see their page, not their conversion rates — a page can be beautiful and convert miserably, and the market leader may convert despite their page rather than because of it. The grid documents choices, not results; only your own A/B tests turn an observation into certainty. Second trap: copying, which is both a strategic mistake (you'll always be the approximate version of the original, without the positioning that makes its choices coherent) and a legal risk as soon as copy or visuals are reused. The grid exists precisely to avoid that: it extracts the logic of competing pages so you can make different choices knowingly.

Once the analysis is done, execution shouldn't take weeks: LanderKit templates (€89 each, €229 for the 10-template bundle) provide the complete conversion structure — hero, social proof, FAQ, form — in React/Tailwind, ready to receive the positioning your grid just revealed. And in six months, redo the exercise on the same three competitors: the rows that moved will tell you what they learned in the meantime.