A great place to start in checking out your competition is the World Wide Web. Nearly every viable business has a website (not necessarily a good one), and you can learn an awful lot about who you are up against by finding and evaluating the sites of others in your industry.
The obvious place to start is with a basic search of your keywords. Google, Bing, and Yahoo are the top three search engines, though Alexa, Ask.com and AltaVista are still holding their own as well. Your best bet is to print the top 100 or so results from each search engine, the review the results. You will likely find a lot of irrelevant entries, depending on your industry and keywords. Be sure to search for different but similar permutations of your keywords as well there can be a surprisingly drastic difference among the results for various similar keywords. For example, if your market is people who are starting a business, check business startup and starting a business and start a business...the results will be different for each.
Once you have a stack of results, look through them for both direct and indirect competitors. You may also want to mark any business that offers a complementary service trading links with them could enhance your SEO efforts. Check out the websites of your direct competitors. Read every page, follow every link. Take time to really get to know their site and what they have to offer. Take notes on any ideas you come up with to improve your own site. Book mark your competitors websites and check in often. Look for any changes in the products they offer or how they are marketing to their customers. If they offer a newsletter, sign up. If they write a blog, keep up with the latest. The most successful entrepreneurs get to know the competition as well as, or better than, the competition knows itself.
Decide which competitors are likely the best in the field and try to figure out how they got to be on top. Identify ways you can build your startup to offer something more or better than those competitors provide. What will be the thing that sets you apart from the others? Why will customers choose you over them? Be sure to keep an eye for any changes. If your competition is significantly bigger than your business, there is a good chance they have marketing professionals on their side paying attention to changes in the market. If they have been around a long time, they may have a good idea of which benefits to feature to entice your target market. Don t copy your competitors, but use the knowledge from what they do to help you make the best decisions for your venture.
Once you have identified you key competitors, check out Alexa.com to see how they are doing on the internet. Alexa provides basic analytics on any website you search for, including page rank worldwide and in the US, user demographics, and the primary keywords used to find their website. You can also use WebsiteGrader.com to see how well a competitor s website is optimized for the search engines.
Get to know your competition. If you are serving a local community only, add a search outside of your area to check out what similar ventures are doing.
One of the keys to marketing success is understanding the competition. Use the World Wide Web as a great way to research your competition, their marketing activities, and their product offerings. The more you know about your competition, the easier it will be to beat them in the marketplace!
Author Resource:
K. MacKillop, an entrepreneur with a J.D. from Duke, is co-founder of LaunchX LLC and authors a business startup blog. The LaunchX System, a complete package of step-by-step business startup procedures, key software and more, answers the question, "Where do I start?" Visit http://www.LaunchX.com .
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