SolveYourProblem
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Series
Learn To Analyze a Competitor’s Website
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.
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.
