10
Steps to Researching Your Competition Online
Regardless of what business you're in, you have competition,
or other businesses who are clamoring for the same consumer dollars as
you. The competition may or may not be in the same industry, e.g. if
you own a movie theatre, your competition will be all venues providing
entertainment, such as bowling alleys, theme parks, skating rinks,
miniature golf courses, in addition to other movie theatres. Take a
moment to determine what business you're in and determine if your type
of business might also attract consumers from other industries.
As an online business owner, your competition may not be as easy to
gauge, especially if you don't have a retail location for your business,
or if you have a global virtual company where you can work with clients
regardless of location, as many coaches, consultants, virtual
assistants, graphic designers, speakers, and website designers do.
How do you begin to assess your competition when your business has no
geographic limits? It's very similar to the steps that a traditional
business might take, but it's all done online.
Here are the ten steps I use to research my competition online:
1. Brainstorm all known competitors. If you've been
in business for any length of time, you probably already have a good
sense of which
other companies offer what you offer. Look up their websites and make a
note of the website addresses. You'll be using this information later.
2. Compile a list of keywords your customer would use to find a
business like yours online. How would your target market find you
online? Create a list of all keywords that they might use. If you
have a business that serves a particular geographic region, you'll want
to create a geographic keyword listing as well, like "cleaning business"
+ "Beaumont, Texas" or "cleaning business" + "Southeast Texas".
3. Conduct a keyword search on the major search engines. The
major players in the search engine game today seem to be Google, Yahoo,
and MSN. It is the results from these search engine queries that will
be the ones most commonly found by your target market. You should try
your search with and without quotation marks, like "cleaning business"
and cleaning business and conduct a search by location, as well, if that
applies to your business. Make a note of the top 10 listings from each
search engine query and those will comprise your top competition, along
with other local competitors that you know about.
4 Visit your competitors' websites and analyze their offerings.
Create a summary of each competitor's services and/or products.
Determine the strength and weaknesses of your competition from the
perspective of your target market. Assess how your offerings are
better/worse/different from that of the competition. Are your prices
higher or lower than theirs? Why? What makes you unique? How can you
capitalize on that uniqueness and set yourself apart from the
competition? By following these steps, you'll discover your competitive
advantage, or the reason(s) your target market does business with you
instead of your competition.
5. Create a spreadsheet to track your results. You'll want to
track your research over time, so create a spreadsheet in which you keep
track of all the information you discover about your competition.
Compare how both your company and the companies of your closest
competition evolve throughout a year.
6. See how your competition stacks up. Determine how popular
your competition is. Download the
Google Toolbar and determine their Google Page Rank and visit
Alexa.com and determine your
competitor's Alexa Traffic Ranking. A higher Google Page Rank (on a
scale of 1-10), indicates more relevance and higher traffic. In Alexa,
the lower your ranking (under 500,000 means your site is fairly well
visited; under 100,000 means your site is a big contender in your
industry), the more relevant your site is deemed. In addition, with
Alexa, you can see the other websites owned by this company, see
related sites visited from this website, as well as other sites with
inbound links to this site. You can use this latter information to
create a list for potential link exchanges or future strategic
alliances. A tool you can use to get both rankings simultaneously is
Rank Alert.
7. Complete an analysis of their websites. What meta tags
are being used on your competitor's websites? How are their websites
optimized for keywords or keyword phrases? How many inbound links do
your competitors have? From what other sites are the inbound links
coming? Two tools you can use to scope out this information on your
competition are Keyword
Density Analyzer and
Link
Popularity Checker.
8. Track your competition with alerts. The easiest way to stay
on top of what your competition is doing is to track them with
Google Alerts and
Yahoo Alerts. In my alerts
notifications, I track both keywords relevant to my business, as well as
the names and website names of my closest competition. Google has
recently added a feature to their alerts system to notify you of blog
postings as well, in addition to website updates and news alerts.
9. Shop your competition. Become your competitor's customer.
Buy the products of your top 5 competitors and familiarize yourself with
their sales process. By doing so, you'll be able to sell your own
product or service more effectively since you'll have a better
understanding of what your competition offers. Becoming their customer
also lets you discover their weaknesses, as well as your own. In
addition, you'll want to join their mailing list or email broadcast list
to keep up-to-date on what they're doing.
10. Regularly visit your competition. Visit the websites of
your top 5 competitors at least once a month to see what's new. In this
way you can spot trends in your industry, as well as determine what
seems to be working well for them and determine how you can apply this
information and knowledge in your own business.
Creating your competitive intelligence helps you stay one step ahead of
your competitors. It's essential to have an up-to-date picture of your
closest competitors and what they are doing so that your company is
remains competitive and a major player in your industry.
(c) 2008 Donna Gunter
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Online Business Resource Queen
(TM) and Online Business Coach Donna Gunter helps independent service
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on the Internet, and get more clients online. To claim your FREE gift,
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Ask Donna an Internet Marketing question at
http://www.AskDonnaGunter.com. Read about running an online biz at her blog,
http://www.GetMoreClientsOnlineblog.com.
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