How To Analyze Your Website’s Competition And Take Their Spot

Plenty of things can be said about the perks of having an online business. Inexpensive marketing platforms, a global audience, automation, and the likes are just a few of the top answers whenever online businessmen are asked why they decided to build their enterprises in the World Wide Web.

But there’s one thing that is often left undisclosed. The online field would also require you to compete with hundreds, if not thousands, of other businesses jockeying for the same market. It’s a virtual race for sales, or for clicks if you’re engaged in a PPC venture. And since any given market is fixed, the amount and power of your competition plays an important role in determining your success in the internet marketing industry.

Competition is said to be at its highest level in the search engine game. As you may very well know, 80% of the traffic that can be generated from any website comes from the search engines. If you are competing with 100 other enterprises, this means that you should try your hardest to beat all 100 of them for the top spot in the search engine results page for every relevant query. This is the best way to ensure that you’ll get first selection on a prospect before they can grab a hold of them.

As is usually the case, search engine optimization (SEO) techniques are everywhere to help you achive a good position in search engine results. Mastering these techniques would give you a greater chance of succeeding in the online industry.

At least in theory.

In practice, however, things aren’t that effortless. What remains unsaid is the fact that most of your competitors will most likely be doing the same things as you will. You’d still have to compete with the tactics that they themselves will employ. And if all of you will be implementing the same strategies, then it’s back to the beginning. If you couldn’t get ahead of your competition in the search engine positions before, there’s no reason why you’d get ahead of them after using the same techniques that they likewise employ.

So what should you do?

Here’s an unconventional tactic. Instead of fighting against your rivals, you could actually learn from them. And in the process, you could steal their spots.

Competition is always about learning the strengths and weaknesses of your opponents. The keys to victory lie in replicating what your opponents are doing right and correcting what your opponents are doing wrong.

And these can only be pulled off by studying their performance.

Let’s give it a shot through an example.

Let's say your online business has something to do with dog grooming. A cursory look at Google would reveal that you have guess based on averages would tell us that around 2.5 million webmasters are engaged in the same field.

In the top spot in the search engine results would be petgroomer.com. This website’s spot is your goal. Your objective is to dislodge this website from its number number one position.

How are you supposed to do that?

Let’s try to study the website. On your Internet browser, go to VIEW then select SOURCE. You’ll be taken to a text file that will show you the source code of the said website. Now examine this source code and answer the following questions:

    •Are you using the SEO techniques the website is employing?
    •What is the website employing that you’re not?
    •What are you employing that the website is not?

For example, the said website is employing META tags. Are you employing the same META tags? Does he have more META tags than you do? The website also hosts a variety of different content pieces. Are its content pieces better than yours? Are there any keywords in such pieces that you have failed to capitalize on? The said website is also using ALT tags. Are you using ALT tags for your pages with same level of ability?

Again, just as a reminder, the trick is to find out what your competitor is doing correctly so that you’d know what to copy, and to determine what your competitor is doing incorrecly so that you’d know where you can beat him.

Now go to www.linkpopularity.com and run a check on that website’s URL. You’ll discover that the said website has 1,927 MSN back links and 2,760 Yahoo back links. The next step is to obtain more back links than what this website has. This is where you should use off page SEO tricks so that you’ll be able to beat the aforementioned top website. If you manage to get more back links, then chances are, Google will consider assigning your website a higher page rank.

These are the secrets to analyzing – and beating – your competition, even if the playing field is justly built. As Arie De Geus did say, “the ability to learn faster than your competitors may be only sustainable competitive advantage.”


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Schwartz, is the founder of Promotions Unlimited,an Internet legal directory (CA, TX & Las Vegas ) publisher and search engine placement technology analyst.  You can contact Bob via e-mail at  seo711@gmail.com or visit his San Diego legal directory at:  http://www.sandiegolawyerforyou.com/special.htm