Every business aims to gain more profit and withstand the current competition in the market. If you want your business to stay in the industry for a long time, you need to beat your existing competitors. You might be wondering how you can beat competitors. Well, if you sit down and spend a little time in reading this article, you’ll know what to do.
In internet marketing, the techniques used vary from time to time. You can never really tell that a successful marketing technique will still work tomorrow or after a week and several months. Here’s a very good idea – look for successful companies online and try to find out their secrets to success. After that, you will need to analyze your business’ competitiveness. You must be able to understand the competitive analysis; that way, you can act on it properly as soon as possible.
To do the competitive analysis, you must first identify your competitors. There are four stages that you need to follow to conduct the analysis. Here’s the general rule – if its impossible to beat your competitors, then you must make improvisations.
Positioning reporting is known as stage one. Take note of the major keywords and keyword phrases used by your competitors on their Meta tags. On the homepage of your competitor, go to ‘view’ in the IE and select the words ‘view source’. Search for the keywords/phrases on Google and other search engines. You can use Excel for documentation. See which keywords appear on the list of top 20s.
Search engine saturation is the next stage. Did the search engines index the websites of your competitors? Saturation is vital to the algorithm of Google. Your site can get higher ranking if more pages of your website is indexed by search engines.
Design critique is a technical stage. You need to examine your competitor’s site in terms of navigation, layout, and design. Most effective sites will have navigation menus, well-worded descriptions using the keyphrases, the use of Alt Tags that are linked to complex navigation and linked images, short titles with the keyphrase, import keyphrases within the text, and carefully optimized every simple sitemap. Your competitor might be using a combination o these elements but not all of them.
How many links and pages does your competitor have? LP or link popularity is a vital factor that makes or breaks websites. Google loves websites that have links coming from other related and reputable sites. Just type this – “link: www.competitorswebsite.com” and you can instantly analyze your competitor’s LP. Backlinks and external links are both important for your website. If you request for a link from related websites, it is already expected that you provide reciprocal links as well.
By identifying the techniques used by your competitors to ensure their success, you can now plan certain actions. Review your website and determine your weak points. When you find any, you need to address them as soon as possible.
You can even get an advanced and professional competitor analysis if you like.
