In case you didn’t know, there are probably hundreds of companies out there doing pretty much the same thing you do. So if youre serious about making the most of your online marketing campaign, youd be wise to devote some time to identifying who your online competitors are. This competitive intelligence can give you the edge online almost immediately.
Real world competitors
In the bricks-and-mortar world, your competitors are relatively easy to identify. You generally know who you beat and who beats you when you bid on a project or send your product out into the market. You and your competitors are all trying to secure a big slice of a market segment, and there are few surprises from year to year.
Online, things are different.
When you move from offline marketing to the unpredictable online landscape, things change radically. Competitors come at you from all angles. Not only will you be competing against your traditional offline competitors, youll also be up against competitors from other regions, virtual competitors with no offline infrastructure, online business directory results and even companies who market educational content pertaining to your industry.
Online you really only have 10 chances to get a prospects attention. And now you have to fight hundreds of other companies for the top 10 positions in any of the major search engines. Anything less, and youve lost.
On that depressing note, all is not lost. If youre willing to wade through a pile of data, theres an arsenal of easy-to-use tools just waiting to help you figure out who you need to beat to get to the top of the search engine results pages (or SERPs). I generally use 3 easy to use search engine tools:
1. Use Google’s ‘similar sites function.
There are 2 types of searches you you perform to make use of Googles ‘similar sites function. The first type is to perform a standard Google search of your companys name. Then, just below the first result, youll see a link labelled ‘similar sites. Clicking this link will perform a new search of all web pages similar to your company name. If your company name includes a reference to your business activity (e.g. Acme Building Supplies), youll not only turn up a number of results for other pages related to Acme, Building and Supplies, but also a number of results related to building, which should include some of your online competitors.
Your second option is to perform a search for one of your websites keyphrases (e.g. townhouse renovations) and perform a ‘similar sites’ search. This will give you a bunch of results for companies competing for the same web traffic as your company. Companies listed in these results are your true online competition.
2. Search for your keywords.
If you arent ranked #1 on Google for your chosen keywords, then performing a Google search will let you know who is in the top 10. These are the companies youre going to be competing with online.
3. See whos advertising.
Many companies will offer the same services as yours, and will be attempting to attract the same prospects as you. If they dont have a high search engine ranking, they may have chosen to advertise using search engine pay-per-click advertising.
To see who is competing with you for prospects, try searching from a customers perspective (e.g. kitchen refurbishment Exeter) and see what advertising results you get. These advertisers are paying search engines good money to ensure they attract the prospect before you do.
You can get totally carried away with a competitor identification study, so you may want to limit your data mining to the top 15-20 threats. Remember though, things happen fast online, so a non-competitor today could become a serious threat tomorrow. For this reason Id recommend carrying out this exercise at least 3 times a year.
Do you have any other competitor identification ideas? Let me know in the comments.