Competition Research
enspire | Web Marketing Competition Research
Successful Internet marketing requires knowledge, experience, the proper tools, knowledge of the market and extensive web space research. To add to that, one of the most valuable assets is an in depth knowledge about competition. If you’ve done any kind of research on your own, you know exactly who your competitors are. But do you know what advantages the have over your online marketing efforts? Are you in tune with their strategies and marketing channels? Do you know what keywords they are targeting? Better yet, what keywords are they not targeting that you should be? What about your competition’s disadvantages? Have you observed mistakes they’ve made that you want to avoid? Evaluating our overall competition in business is always a good idea and there is allot we can learn from the knowledge obtained. We like to take it a step further and leverage this knowledge to your advantage. Here are just a few of the metrics we will investigate to give you that competitive advantage.
Evaluate Competitor’s On-Site SEO Advantages
Our evaluation starts with the basic SEO principles. If your competition has done their homework and labored in optimizing their site and you haven’t, then these basic fundamentals will have to be addressed before we can see real success. When evaluating a competitor’s on-site SEO factors, we’ll look at the quality and amount of content they have to offer, the frequency of content updating, the site navigation and link structure and how well they’re ranking for the given industry keywords. We’ll also dig into their pages meta information and what’s happening beneath the surface. All of the above can be extremely insightful in gauging where the competition is and how well they’ve executed SEO efforts.
Competitive Keyword Research
It is very common in web marketing to see half of an industry targeting the same exact keyword/keyword phrase. All the while, there remains a bounty of keywords that are relevant and high quality not being targeted at all! There is very common phrase among Internet marketers referring to keywords – The Long Tail Theory. This theory or strategy rather, describes the targeting of very niche keywords where search volume is relatively low in general but the conversion rate is very high and the competition is hopefully less.
A highly competitive search example would be this: california car insurance
Now this may not be to obvious to some, but any car insurance salesman would love to have a top ranking position for california car insurance, and that’s the problem, everyone wants it and everyone is competing for it! That’s fine if your heart is set on ranking for your “pet keyword phrase”, we’ll just help show you some other possibilities that can significantly save you expense and time.
Lets look a different variation with most likely a much lower search volume but very high quality traffic: car insurance agents in Redding, CA.
Notice the second search is much more specific, hence the “long tail” and may be more likely to convert because of its specificity. Targeting these keywords can significantly increase qualified traffic and result in more conversions overall. Other advantages are the cost per click is usually much lower with long tail keywords, it is easier to rank very well for long tail terms, you reach a different audience by targeting something more specific and highly relevant.
We will learn about your business and industry in detail. Then we will conduct the research and determine multiple high yielding keyword phrases to integrate into your web marketing strategy.
Advanced Off-Site SEO Research
There are many search ranking factors included in the algorithm’s of Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Some of these factors are on-site and some are off-site. On-site factors would be things like meta titles, tags, keywords, etc. Off-site factors include metrics like number of incoming links, quality and PageRank of incoming links, anchor text within incoming links, etc.
We take an in depth look at of these fundamental elements of your as they apply to your competition and compare the findings side by side with your off-site data. Your competition could be outranking you because you have 2 back links and they have 6,000. Your competition may also be outranking you because you 6,000 really crappy back links and they have 100 high PageRank, highly relevant back links. We will determine what their off-site advantages are and pass along to you a strategy that will put you back in the running for high performance.
Investigating the Social Mediasphere
Another channel that can have a significant impact on how well your web marketing matches up to your competition is Social Media. Social media is an extremely broad term and can have many implications in marketing. There are a handful of things that should be considered when looking at your competition and their social media strengths or weaknesses.
First, what is their level of engagement compared to yours? Are they actively engaging audiences within social media? Is your competition actively creating content that drives traffic to their site from all corners of the social media landscape? Brand awareness can significantly increase if social media is used correctly and increased brand awareness can positively affect your bottom line.
Typically, if your competition is engaged in social media, constantly updating their site with new engaging content through a blog, forum, or news section, they might have you beat in a couple of ways: a larger audience reach, more content to offer search engines and visitors and more public interaction. We always recommend engaging the social media channel at some level. Depending on your competition and your industry, we will develop an effective strategy that will set you apart in the social media landscape and improve your overall web presence.
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