Competitor Research and Analysis

A Brief Introduction to Competitor Research and Analysis

This unit covers competitive research and analysis. Competitive analysis is essential if you wish to carry out effective search engine optimization of your web pages.

After completing this unit, you should be able to:

• Locate competitors’ websites
• Determine the level of online competition for your product or services and whether there is a viable online market for your product.
• Determine whether competition is too fierce for a given keyphrase (or not), and whether you have to revise your keyword strategy and target less competitive keyphrases.
• Determine quantity and quality of external links you need for your links campaign in order to compete with other leading sites.

This unit assumes (but does not demand) that you have read the last unit of this course on Keyword research and understand how to a select and refine a list of keywords in response to search engine competition.

8.1 Competition

In this context, the competitors you face are the people who rank highly in search engine results for the same or similar products or services that you offer.

8.1.1 Why Competition Research is important

Competition analysis is an essential part of the search engine optimization process. In order to succeed in online marketing and gain a higher ranking for your product in search engine results, you need to assess the state of the online market for your product and gain some idea of who your leading competitors are. By doing this, you

• Get a better idea of the market for, and the viability of, your product or services.
• Gain a better idea of the audience you should be targeting
• Gain a sense of the level of optimisation required for your site.

If, on the other, hand you fail to assess your market in the correct manner, you run the risk of :

• Being outstripped by your competitors in terms of search engine rankings
• Attempting to sell a product that is not viable
• Applying the wrong level of optimisation to your site

8.2 Competition Analysis

In the last unit of the course, we looked at how competition impacts upon your choice of keywords. Competition analysis can be considered a further essential stage of research to augment and complement your keyword research. As well as giving you a better idea of the keywords you should be targeting, analysis of your competitors’ web pages gives you a much better idea about the condition of the market you are entering and the level of optimization required for your own site.