Competition Analysis; Find Out What “They” Are Doing  (Part 3 of a 3 part post)

Recap for Post #2

• If your online business is NOT built upon a strong foundation; in a market with a sufficient demand and relatively low competition, your idea may crumble or will be too costly to test.
• Initial online market research can be conducted using the Google keyword tool; Brainstorm interests and write down variations of key terms people might type into Google in relation to those interests, repeat until you find a viable niche market.

The next step is taking a look at your potential competition and then determining what direction you want to take with your website.

When looking at keywords there is Pay-Per Click competition and SEO competition. PPC competition is easier to gauge. You can see roughly how much your competition is paying for the keywords you want to target by using the Google keyword tool. This directly relates to the number of different websites who are bidding on those keywords (Note that the Keyword tool numbers are NOT always accurate, the best way to get this data is to start advertising yourself…how convenient for Google)

 Competition Analysis

SEO competition is every website on the web that is somewhat related to yours. However, there are many shades of grey when it comes to organic SEO competition. To simplify this, let’s categorize it into two types of competition; direct and indirect.

Direct would be a site that is selling the same type of product as you.

Indirect would be a site that may be offering something completely different but has the same target market as you.

The most effective competition analysis is to do a good old Google search for the keyword you want to target and look at websites that appear in the rankings for that keyword (great way to get ideas also). Also, consider the number of sites that appear in grey font right under the Google search bar, but don’t get attached to this number.

Here are some things to consider when doing a competition analysis on competing sites, but don’t get too attached to these either.

• If your targeted keyword is in their Page Title and Page Description (most important)
• Google page rank
• Number of inbound links
• Alexa ranking

You can find some of this data out with the Google Chrome SEO toolbar.

Next, decide how you want to position your site to your market…hmm another post??