Three Steps to Thorough Competition Analysis

When you engage in competitive analysis, you need to be prepared for the tasks ahead. Your research will require significant analytical comprehension, insight and strong reasoning skills. In order to understand your statistics, consider how each point relates to the next and place your analysis in a larger context. Don't be afraid to use any statistical tool out there to double check the validity of your statistical conclusion.

Do you know who your competition is?

Your competitors are all over the place and there's no way you can possible learn about all of them, so you must decide on a select few - preferably five to ten. In order to narrow down those competitors, you'll eventually rely on keyword analysis. These services are often provided by Google Trends, WebSEO Analytics and Google (through simple keyword searches). Your competition are there for a reason and often deploy aggressive online and offline marketing methods in order to remain in their position.

Here's what I suggest:

• Visit Wordstream's Keyword Niche Finder
• You will find that Keyword Niche Finder also provides excellent keyword suggestion (a tool you may still use to develop SERP analysis). I researched information concerning social media and this is what I found:

It is very clear that the term "social media" is a hot topic on the internet, so if your business is in anyway related to social media, I suggest you figure out where your topic, business plan, or your material resides.

• With your niche and content effectively decided, look at your niche trend using Google Trends for Social Media. Google Trends provides excellent insight on the social impact of a particular keyword, or keyword phrase:

With this insight, you're able to analyze how relevant such a business or niche market is, its demand, and it's timely fluctuations. You can see the steady rise and fall of the term "social media". This information can be geo-locally specified, meaning that if you wish to offer a product in a certain country, you can specify Google Trends to provide that information based on that country only.

• Determine your competitors using Alexa, in this case Social Media competitors. Upon your search, you'll find Ignite Social Media Agency and from Alexa's information, you can expect what kind of competition they've got as well as where they are the most prominent (see figure below).

This information is pertinent for your overall success. According to Alexa's report, this website obtains a lot of traffic from the search query "social media agency", which you will be competing for. Furthermore, you can also see the variations of the term "social media agency", important information to add to your website's META tags

During this information-gathering activity, you can assuredly determine how much percentage of their marketing is either online or offline, how many relations they've made with other websites (revealed as backlinks), and analyze their partners and their revenue.

What are your competitor's strengths and weaknesses?

There are a number of ways you can assess your competitor's strengths and a lot of tools you can use to determine its value in the market. Here, I provide ways you can assess this information:

• Look at your competitor, in this case, Ignitemedia's backlinks. This information will provide you extensive qualitative information about their online networking connections, where and why they are represented there and perhaps giving you a direction on where to go to acquire significant popularity. These are their strengths. There are a number of places you can look for information regarding backlinks on a website:
  • Alexa:
  • Google:
  • Yahoo:
• Analyze meta information. Before, we used Alexa to indicate how search engines deem Ignitemedia's search engine ranking position (SERP) and the keywords that dominate across their page. Now, let us compare with actual meta data appearing on their website. Here, we will use WebSEO Analytics's Keyword Analyzer:

As you can see, WebSEO Analytics provides exceptional information regarding the prevelance, density, and frequency. Each of those measures indicate how often these keywords appear and how well they are indexed by search engines. With the term "social media" being such a competitive keyword phrase, you can try "media agency" and "media marketing", producing significant results in the long-run.

Where are your competitors in the sea of search results?

I highly recommend using SERP tools to find out where you are among the results. These tools are extremely useful. With this information, you will see whether the keywords you've selected for articles are effective, and if not, you can alternatively use keyword suggestion tools based on your article's content. With this information readily available, as I have described above, consider how SERP analytics can be used with Ignitemedia.com as an example:

You can find this awesome SERP Analytics Tool at WebSEO Analytics. They also offer suggestions on how to improve your SEO and garner the best results possible.

Once you've chosen these suggested keywords using all the aforementioned links and tools above, you will be able to statistically and intelligently deduce which position you wish to achieve and how you can get there. You can alternatively hire SEO consultants who will essentially perform this very function. With these competitive analytics in mind, you can pursue more rigourous marketing tactics to increase your product's recognition and develop a powerful brand awareness. Good luck!

Guest post by: Sufi M and his staff operate The Glaring Facts, one of the leading and densely populated websites involving psychology, media-related material, history of science, and money management. We are certain you will find something that will fascinate you.

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