Competitive analysis in the world of internet marketing can make a vast difference to the success of your business. Your competitors can teach you a lot.
Your online competitors can teach you what to do, what not to do, they can help you manage your own search engine optimisation and search engine marketing, and can help you keep your finger on the pulse of your industry.
Learn What To Do
You want a unique selling proposition. You want to stand apart from the crowd. But, you can learn from successes of companies that are more advanced than you are. Regardless of what niche market you’re going after, you will probably find a successful company. You can learn a lot about getting successful and marketing effectively by analysing their business model.
Learn What Not To Do
Beyond learning what to do, you can learn from the mistakes your online competitors make. Analyse their layout, look up reviews of their products to see what people complain about, dissect their SEO so you can learn to do what they do – and make yours better.
Industry News
As a business person, it’s important for you to be an expert in your field. Analysing your online competition and the industry in general can help you stay on top of industry news and changes. Don’t only get your info from competition, though. Keeping your knowledge current so you can be a source of breaking news instead of just following suit can help you gain a competitive advantage.
SEO – SEM – SMO
Analyse the keywords and phrases that your competition is ranking for. Figure out how they’re getting those rankings and you can expose holes in their strategy that you can capitalise on and use to help you surpass their rankings. Through analysing someone else’s strategy, you can easily fine-tune and improve your own.
Figure out where they get backlinks from. Check out which words and phrases they’re dominating in the major search engines. Read their ads and check out their landing pages. Check out their Facebook page, their Twitter account, and other social media profiles as well. You can follow their followers, you can emulate some of their methods (without copying / plagiarizing, of course), and learn from mistakes so you can provide more value to your target customers.
No one should rely solely on their competitors to help them succeed, but regularly analysing your toughest online competitors as well as those who are hot on your tail (yes, once you get successful, expect your competition to analyse YOU) if you’re already successful can help you gain or retain your competitive advantage.
See you at the top of Google!
Sean Rasmussen
SEO Australia Pacific
AussieSEO.com © 2007 - 2010
When starting out, learning from your online competitors, is often the fastest way to get up to speed with your competitors.
Its amazing how studying competitors can generate my own ideas, that can give me an advantage.
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I love your post! Definitely agree that the way to success online is to follow in the footsteps of those who have come before you and who are succeeding online. For me, when I start a new Adwords campaign on Google, the first thing I do is spy on my competitors. I’ll type in the keywords I wish to rank for and see what the top 5 ads are using in their ad copy. Then I simply take all their copy in and rewrite it in my own words and the first couple ads I put up are regurgitations from my competition. It almost always works when it comes to converting instant traffic and I’d like to pass this tip onto anyone! Try it out.
Great post, I especially love the point about checking out your competitors keywords and backlinks. If you know they are doing a pretty good job at seo it is such a timesaver and will just a little bit of effort to do it even better than they you can often outrank even some big fish.
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