Online Competitor Analysis

When did you last take time out to analyse your competition? Recently? Occasionally? Never?

Taking time to perform Online Competitor Analysis is a great way to determine not only what your own advertising should look like, but it also gives you a means of contacting their link allies and learning from their marketing efforts, as well as strategising so you can surpass them in search engine rankings.

Finding Your Online Competitors

Before you can do anything else, you have to know who your competitors are. There are several ways to do this, some offering more specific results than others.

Start with a simple search. Input your most relevant keywords on the page of the major search engine of your choice. Take a look at which websites come up on the first page. This gives you a good idea of who your main competitors are.

Google Adwords helps you find out how many competitors use a specific keyword phrase, but it doesn’t list their URLs unless you are running a current campaign.

For more specific results, use one of the several online software tools you can download for free. If you maintain a blog, try Fast Blog Finder, which is available in both a free or upgraded version. You put in your keywords, and it will not only find all relevant blogs, it will tell you whether or not they are nofollow, and give you the site’s ranking.

Compete.com also offers a free service. You can use the index to look up tags other users have already associated with websites, and it will return a list of those sites. You can drill down a bit deeper to find out what kind of online traffic they are receiving, but the free service only allows access to limited information.

What To Look For And Where To Find It

Once you’ve identified your main competitors, you need to take a look at their site and its statistics. There are a variety of tools that can help you accomplish this.

Google Trends gives you an estimation of the amount and type of traffic to a particular site. It also offers a listing of search terms used to reach that site. The only problem is that it indexes large sites with a minimum number of visitors, so smaller sites will not appear in your query. Still, knowing traffic trends and search terms for a competitor offers some good information on how to optimise your own site.

WebArchive.org can be a real eye-opener. This amazing site allows you a glimpse into the evolution of a particular website by showing historical snapshots of pages. It allows you to see what your competition has done to change with the times and optimise their site accordingly. Use what others have done to determine the best way to update your own website.

Yahoo Site Explorer will return a list of all pages and inbound links when you input a particular URL. This can be useful to determine if there is some cross promotion you could do with a competitor’s allies. This is also the place where you can authenticate your site with Yahoo and add a website feed.

You can use the information you gather on your competition to do many things. For one, it might reveal an opportunity for a partnership. It may identify some new ideas for keyword optimisation on your pages. It allows you to rank your own place in the market and lets you determine if you need to step up your online marketing efforts.

Use Online Competitor Analysis as a tool to improve your own site’s performance and offerings. There is a wealth of information out there on other URLs that you can use to your own advantage.

Have a most outstanding day.

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketing
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008 - 2012