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10 Steps to Researching Your Competition Online

Thursday, November 09, 2006

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: http://www.rankaler t.net/siterank. php

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:
http://www.ranks. nl/tools/ spider.html, and Link Popularity
Checker:
http://www.freewebs ubmission. com/link- popularity. html

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 remaining
competitive and a major player in your industry.

About the Author:

Online Business Resource Queen (TM) and Online Business
Coach Donna Gunter helps self-employed service
professionals learn how to automate their businesses,
leverage their expertise on the Internet, and get more
clients online. To sign up for more FREE tips like these
and claim your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing
Toolkit, visit her site at
http://www.GetMoreC lientsOnline. com . Vist her blog at
http://www.GetMoreC lientsOnlineBlog .com

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