Understanding Your Online Competition

July 5, 2011 0 Comments

This is the next post in the series How to Build a Business Online in 7 Steps.

Step 1.5 – Understanding your competition

Now we need to focus on who your competition is going to be online; it won’t necessarily be who you think it is.

The reason for this is we are going to find the websites that are at position number 1 in the Google search results for your top keyword phrases. These websites are the ones we will want to replace in order to get your website to number one! These sites are your online competition. They may be the companies you consider to be your competition, they may not.

The way to find them is to choose 3 keywords from the list you downloaded. Don’t just take the keywords with the most searches as these will be too competitive at this stage, instead choose 3 keyword phrases that contain 3 or more words and are directly relevant to your products or services.

For example, if you sell digital cameras, the highest searched keyword will be “digital camera”, instead choose something like “canon digital camera” if that is one of the products you supply. After you have chosen your 3 keyword phrases type them into Google and make a note of the website that comes in at position number one. This is your competitor for that keyword.

Now for each competitor you need to find out how they got to number one. A quick and dirty way of doing that is to find out which websites, and what type of websites, are linking to them. For this we go to Yahoo and in the search box enter “site:www.your-competitors-website.com”, without the quotes.Yahoo will return a list of websites that link to your competitors website.