Analyzing Your Competitors Website.

If you want to be successful online then one of the very first factors is research.

There are many different ways to analyze your competition before you spend any money on creating your online business.

When you decide on a niche and  you begin to analyze your competitors websites, you need to make sure you’re prepared to do the job thoroughly.

Every one of your Competitors’ websites, if analyzed properly, can give you all the information that you need and can use to increase the traffic and the popularity of your site in the serach engines.

You can use these websites to analyze your own market and look for what products are being sold or whether they are giving things away for free.These types of things tell you how profitable your market will be and will allow you to set a price on your product.

If a site ius receiving  a lot of visitors it has to be doing something right. Find  out where it is ranked in the search engines, what are the keywords in the meta tags and title, how the site is formatted, and what you can do to to out rank these sites.

Also be sure to keep copyright laws in mind as a copyright infringement suit is never good for you, your site, or your blood pressure and in most cases duplicate content will kill your site before it even starts.

Identifying the Authority Sites

You need to start off by identifying the major players – a good place to do this is with any of three main search engines. It’s not as comprehensive as it once was, but it’s good if you’re looking for the major players.

There are however easier and less time consuming ways to do this. To see what I mean download a trial version of Seo Elite and type in your main keyword and this program will show you the authority sites about your topic. These are the sites that you will be competing against if you want to succeed.

You can however do all this manually by printing out the directory to take a closer look. Look to see if you will be competing against  large companies, as well as innovative approaches and new products.

You can also use this approach as away to identify niche markets that the major players or web marketing gurus have not identified and exploited. If you can find new niches you’re basically set as far as traffic goes.

You should also consider Yahoo!’s search directory as the place to be listed, as this is where most of the authority sites are listed as well as in Dmoz.

Understanding these kinds of associations are very  important if you want to start to grow an online business and gain more and more traffic and conquer your niche market. Try to identify all places that the authority sites are listed, using link:www.theirdomain in the search bar is a good help and try and get listed there as well.

It really is about who you know so the bigger the site the more benefit to you. You might not be ready to take on the authority sites, but the only way to get there is to sit down and give it a shot and it ill be a very good shot if you have done you research.

I only use two free tools to judge a sites relevance and they are Alexa and the google toolbar this tells me which sites get the most traffic. These tools give you a rough idea of where your competitors are in the pecking order.

Spy on Your Competition

The next step is to study the top 5 or 10 competitors very closely. There is a lot that can be learned by looking at competitors website and analyzing them. Again one of the best tools online at the moment for spying on your competitors is Seo Elite these are the things that you should look for.

1. Make sure you check to see what products or services they offer, and note anything that’s different from your own offerings. Look for gaps that you could fill or whether they are giving away free products.
2. Think about the look, feel and functionality of their website this is 50% of holding your prospects.
3. See what advertising campaigns and offers they’re running.
4. Look at their strengths and weaknesses, from the customer’s point of view.
5. See if you can figure out their strategy such as who they are linking to what directories are they in, are they using blogs or do they have squdoo account.

Look for any articles that have been written by the web site owner, this is easy to do just by typing in a name will bring up any articles. Or with Seo Elite and analying their backlinks you can see if any article directories are linking to them.

Remember find the Strengths of your competitors websites, can you do it better?, Are their any Vulnerabilities, and are they fully promoting their niche.

Once you research is complete, summarize the information you’ve researched into a few sentences and categories for each competitor, make sure you highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each one.

Note all the marketing strategies that are going to be necessary to counter their offering – these will depend on your own website’s strengths. If you’re small, then you’ll need to be resourceful to exploit their weaknesses.

With this research, you can create your marketing plan well before spending a dime on hosting or web design. Be sure to include how you intend to deal with competition, and what steps you think you’ll need to take for you site to rank well in the search engines.

Once you’ve finished analyzing your competitors, you need to consider whether it would be better not to compete at all, and find a less-saturated niche market.

Don’t get frightened away prematurely, though – make sure you know what you’re getting into before you start, and don’t let big companies or marketing gurus intimidate you. Remember that you can move faster than they can! All you have to do is offer your customers things they can’t find anywhere else.

Being online and having researched many niches I would suggest these two tools for you to use in finding your niche market, they are Seo Elite and Keyword Elite combined these two seo tools will put you on the money 85% of the time..