Analyze your Competitor’s Website before they Analyze yours!
How to Analyze a Competitor’s Website is a fundamental lesson for anyone seeking to develop or promote their website. Real-world marketing basics still apply to the virtual world. The 3Ps (Product, Pricing and Promotion) expand into 4Ps (Product, Pricing, Promotion and Placement). SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) applies to website search engine optimization.
Analyzing a Competitor’s Website is similar to analyzing the business itself. Learning how to analyze every aspect of your competitor’s business will ensure your advantage in building successful search engine, marketing and sales strategies.
If you are targeting a specific competitor, it’s obvious you go to their website to start. Research your competitor and their parent company, subsidiaries, legal names, and domain names. Go to the United States Patent and Trademark Office at www.uspto.gov, World Intellectual Property Organization www.wipo.int, and the US Securities and Exchange webpage at www.sec.gov, and www.hoovers.com.
Now you have information for cross-referencing and their financial status. If they’ve been losing money, you may be able to take over. If your competitor has a strong financial background, you should concentrate on finding your niche. Do a search for “similar pages” to locate other similar competitors. See if they are involved in cloaking or link farming. Check out www.copyscape.com to see if they have duplicate pages.
Analyze all of the links on your competitor’s website: reciprocal, inbound and outbound links for each page. Google “link:nameofwebsite.” This will give you a list of the websites that link into the website. Evaluate those pages. Firefox has new SEO tool at http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html which includes tools that will tell you about links to blogs, del.icio.us, Technorati, Google PageRank and age of the domain.
Keywords are at the heart of search engine results. You can determine the keywords, keyword count and keyword density at http://www.googlerankings.com/ultimate_seo_tool.php. Think of tangents. See if the keywords are used in the links, file names, document titles or body text. Google allintitle:keywordyouchoose” (finds keyword in the title of webpages) and “allinurl:keywordyouchoose,” (finds keyword in URLs). There are online tools, toolbars and downloads available for analyzing websites. Do a search for “tools analyze seo” or “free online tools analyze competition.” Check for downloads for marketing competition analysis software at www.Zdnet.com and www.download.com.
Once you know who your competition is, you need to know who the customers are. That’s traffic. Make sure your “toolbox” includes tools to analyze the traffic patterns to each page. Find who’s clicking where, how much, and why. Content defines your competitor. What is missing from theirs? Can you fill a void or compliment each other? Is there room for expansion or a niche? What services do they offer? Can you provide better customer satisfaction? Are there complaints on the web? Check blogs and social communities for possible criticisms about the website.
Learning how to analyze a competitor’s website is just the beginning. Once you collect the information, and evaluate it, you need to use it and develop a strategy to beat it. Take your competitive analysis seriously, and make your mark in the search engine results. Analyze your competition today, and you could beat them in their rankings tomorrow. Learning how to analyze your competition is the first step, now use what you learned!
