One of the most important things you need to know for becoming successful in internet marketing is your enemy. You need to know who your competitors are and what advantages they have over you. Once you know those things, you know where you need to improve. But, how exactly do we find out who our biggest competitors are and how do we find out how they out perform us? Well, this article will explain the basics of researching the competition and how to compare their websites to your own. In fact, most of the techniques I’m going to show you can also be used for researching competition for your products, company, and even your self. So, let’s get started.
The first weapon in our research toolbox is of course the almighty Google. When most people think of Google, they only think of the search engine that they use for finding websites that have “stuff” that they are interested in. Well, what if you are interested in learning who your competitors are? Why would you not use Google search for that too? You can easily type any keywords into the Google search and find millions of websites that Google believes are relevant to the keywords you searched with. In many of my other articles, I used the example “Joe’s Bookstore” and will use that again here. So here goes.
Good ol’ Joe decides he wants to know what other websites are out there that are in the “book” market. So, the first thing he does is heads over to Google and does a search for “books”. Right away he realizes that there are about 1,070,000,000 other websites that are listed for the phrase “books”. Joe realizes that “books” is way too broad for finding out who his competitors are. So, he decides to narrow his search by locating only the websites that originate from his local area by refining his keywords. Wow! By using a phrase such as “chattanooga bookstores”, Joe’s search results dropped from 1 billion down to 38,100. Luckily, the first thing he sees in the search results is a result labeled “Local business results for bookstores near Chattanooga, TN“. How convenient is that?!?
Immediately, Joe has a list of 7 of his local competitors. He can easily click through each of the links to get some good information. For example, he can visit each of those sites where he will take notes of things such as site layout, fonts & colors, navigation, product categories, product prices, etc… He can then compare these things to his own website to find out how his site compares. Some of the key things Joe will take note of are the navigation of the other sites, the keywords & content used in the other sites, and how everything is laid out in general.
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