Sizing Up Your Website's Competition
Today we are going to talk about online competition. More often than not, our clients tell us that they want a website because they need to compete online with competitors in the marketplace. Or more accurately, they tell us they want a website because the competition has one. All of our lives we have been taught that being first in our chosen endeavors is how you should strive to go through life. Academics, promotions, black Friday sales. =) But when it comes to having a website, being second or even last amongst your competition can have tremendous advantages. Here's are 3 key reasons why: 1. Design. They've put themselves out there already so you and your design team can analyze their website and "cherry pick" the good and throw out the bad and come up with a design that is more relevant for your industry and more importantly your targeted customer base. 2. Keyword Analysis. (Yes this is part of SEO farther down in the article, but thought it important enough to stand on its own for this writing). If you've looked at the Web Design of Kansas website, or read this blog you should be aware that we are an SEO focused web design company. Keywords and content (to us) are as important to design. Analyzing your competitions keywords and location of those keywords is outstanding intelligence you can use to write your content, page titles and meta tag data. Need help? Well you're in luck. The internet has plenty of keyword analysis tools that you can use for FREE. Google Keyword Analysis Tool: A great tool to identify keywords. All you need to do is enter the website address of any website and Google will do its magic and identify the top keywords, the advertising competition for those keywords, and the global monthly searches for those keywords. FYI - this is offered as part of Google's AdWords platform and that is why you have an "advertising competition" category in the results. SEO Book Keyword Analysis Tool: Another version of keyword analysis, SEO Toolbook will provide a listing of single keywords, two word keyword phrases, and 3 word keyword phrases as well as the number of times they are used on the web page and their keyword density. SEO Analysis: If you haven't gotten the "memo", SEO and all of the techniques involved as compared to your competition is what gives a website a potentially superior ranking. So it stands to reason that analyzing your competitors website for SEO strengths and weaknesses makes good sense, right? Website Grader by HubSpot is a great tool to get a 'real time' and FREE SEO analysis of your competitors website(s). The Website Grader delivers important information covering several categories that are important to SEO and can help you determine how SEO healthy your competitors websites are and what you need to do to match and hopefully surpass them in the future. Back links to your competitors site. If your competitors have been online for any length of time they have been establishing back links. And many of them may be from vendors that you both use. Wouldn't it be great to know which ones so you could ask for a back link as well? You can, very simply. Head over to our old friend Google and type this into the search bar and type the word links, followed by a colon, followed by the name of the website you want to check. links:somesite.com What will come up is a list of every back link that goes to your competitors website. Reviewing these will allow you to determine the value of these links and provides a great start to building your own 'vitally important' inbound link strategy. Alright, there you go. A good fundamental understanding of what you can use to uncover your competitors online strengths and weaknesses. This information can prove to be very valuable as you work develop an online marketing and deployment strategy. But always keep in mind: "what is good for the goose is good for the gander". These techniques could be used on your site as well. Oh well, just have the best site out there so all of your competitors are jealous, right?Jess Marlow is the owner of [http://www.webdesignofkansas.com]http://www.webdesignofkansas.com. Offering Website Design and Marketing to small businesses throughout the state of Kansas. Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com/?Sizing-Up-Your-Websites-Competition&id=6138494] Sizing Up Your Website's CompetitionComments [0]
