Search Engine Traffic

Whether you are launching a brand new website or adding new sections to your old website, you will need to do some competitive analysis before jumping in with two feet. The good news is that it is pretty easy to perform some simple competitive intelligence study these days with all the tools available on the internet. We will give you a simple framework to go about doing this. (Hint: we are not talking about pretexting here, that’s too expensive )

The competitive analysis framework we are going to discuss here includes just a few simple steps:

• Understand Your Market
• Find Out Top 10 Competitors
• Scope Out Your Target Audience
• New Market Entrants

Understand Your Market

In order to do effective market intelligence, you have to understand the market or industry you operate in. You will need to have at least a basic understanding of the value chain and various players in the eco-system. Is the market a business to business market or is it a direct consumer market? Is the market share concentrated in a few major players or does it have a wide variety of competitors in the market? Is the market primarily online or offline? Is the market/industry in general an early adopter of technology or laggard? Understanding these important distinctions will help guide your choosing of the market you want to be in.

Take the cellular phone ringtones industry as an example, it is clearly a consumer market because individual consumers make the ultimate purchase decisions. The ringtone industry also has a number of players but has no clear leader in the space, which means that the vendors are going to be eager to work with affiliates to promote their ringtones. Lastly technology has made it super easy to buy and download ringtones to a users phone without even a credit card. All these factors made the ringtone affiliate market a great place to be in in the early days.

Find Out Top 10 Competitors

Hopefully you have already done some keyword research by now that you would like to start a new site about them. Then this part is easy. This top competitor tool gives you top 10 websites for your targeted keywords from Google and Yahoo.

For example, if one of your keyword phrase is ‘making money online’, which are very competitive keywords but we will use them for demo purposes, you will get the following results from the tool. You can see that Daran’s ProBlogger.net ranks #1 for a much sought after keywords.

Of course, you want your site to rank well on a range of keyword phrases so that your organic traffic does not depend on a single phrase. You will just do the same to find out the top 10 competitive sites for each of the key phrases you have chosen.

In the next installment, we will talk about how you go about scoping out your target audience (i.e. customers).

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