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How to Analyze a Competitor's Websiter
When you analyze a competitors website, you need to make sure you're
prepared to do the job correctly. Competitors' websites, if analyzed
properly, can give you all sorts of information that you can use to increase
the traffic and the popularity of your site. You can use these sites to
analyze your own market. If a site gets a lot of hits it has to be doing
something right. Check out where it is ranked, what key words it uses, how
it is formatted, and what you can do to exemplify the good and filter out
the bad. Also be sure to keep copyright laws in mind as a copyright
infringement suit is never good for you, your site, or your blood pressure.
Identifying the Leaders.
You need to start off by identifying the major players - a good place to do
this is Yahoo's directory. It's not as comprehensive as it once was, but
it's good if you're looking for the major players. You may want to print out
the directory to take a closer look. Look for large companies, as well as
innovative approaches and new products. Also use this examination as an
attempt to identify the niche markets that the major players have not
identified and exploited. If you can find new niches you're basically set as
far as traffic goes.
Also consider that since Yahoo!'s directory is the place that you look to
find the big players, it may be a good place to get listed in order to
become a big player. These little associations are important if you want to
start to attain more and more traffic and conquer a niche or category. Try
to identify all places that the big dogs hang out and start hanging out
there. It's all about who you know in this business so bigger is better. You
might not be ready to play with the big dogs, but the only way to get there
is to sit down and give it a shot.
Sites like Media Metrix 500 can tell you which companies get the most
traffic, and you can learn about the relative traffic by using Alexa. Alexa
is a free add-on to your browser that ranks the traffic to each sire you
visit, telling you whether it's in the top 100, the top 1000, the top
10,000, and so on. This gives you a rough idea of where your competitors are
in the pecking order.
Scrutinize the Leaders.
The next step is to study the top 5 or 10 competitors very closely. There is
a lot that can be learned by looking at competitors website and analyzing
them. These are the things that you should look for.
1. Make sure you check to see what products or services they offer, and note
anything that's different from your own offerings. Look for gaps that you
could fill.
2. Think about the look, feel and functionality of their website.
3. See what advertising campaigns and offers they're running.
4. Look at their strengths and weaknesses, from the customer's point of
view.
5. See if you can figure out their strategy.
When you're dealing with publicly traded companies, you can often get
detailed information from their SEC filings. Write down the names of their
key players and then look for any interviews and speeches they might have
made about their website.
Look for Strengths, Vulnerabilities, and Gaps.
Now, summarize the information you've found into a few sentences for each
competitor, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each one. Note
strategies that are going to be necessary to counter their offering - these
will depend on your own website's strengths. If you're small, then you'll
need to be resourceful to exploit their weaknesses.
With this research, you can create a marketing plan. Be sure to include how
you intend to deal with competition, and what steps you think you'll need to
take for you site to come out on top. Once you've finished analyzing your
competitors, you need to consider whether it would be better not to compete
at all, and find a less-saturated market.
Don't get frightened away prematurely, though - make sure you know what
you're getting into before you start, and don't let big companies intimidate
you. Remember that you can move faster than they can! All you have to do is
offer your customers things they can't find anywhere else.
The top software for analyzing your competitors sites, and optimizing
your own site for the search engines is
SEO Elite - highly recommended
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