Useful Tips To Research Your Competition
When you are completing your research for your niche, you are trying to make sure it is a topic that is popular and will also ultimately bring in money. After completing your niche research, you need to dive into competitor research.
It may not seem like a big deal, but you want to have a good idea about what is already out there on the internet with regard to your niche, and who people already trust as an authority. This one extra step in your research can benefit your online business tremendously. You don't have to spend a whole evening completing this step, in fact you can probably finish in about 30 minutes or less.
Start your research with Google
Google is the best place to start your research for your competition. You can begin by typing in a topic or keyword that is related to your website.
For example, I want to build a website about baking cookies. I decide to do a search around the keyword "baking cookies" to start.
Plenty of results are going to filter through onto the first page and I can start to see my competition for both paid and organic results. Some results will even show up based on my location.
When you are looking through your results be careful of .org and major corporation sites because they are already well established.
I will avoid listing any of these results as my major competitors because they are not in the same category as me. I am in the category of a solopreneur working my way toward making money online through my website. I am looking for other people who have built themselves up and established a revenue online just like I am trying to do.
These results match my criteria much better. These are blogs started by ordinary people like me that love to bake cookies. Since they appeared on the first page of Google I would consider these websites to be some of my top competition in my niche.
You can then make a list of about 5 of these websites and create the criteria you want to compare.
Join their mailing lists
I always like to join mailing lists of sites I really like to hopefully get ideas, and see how they set up their email campaigns.
Everyone has a different voice and a different technique to engage their audience. Some things to pay attention to is how often they send an email and what it contains.
Are they offering advice? Do they have a weekly newsletter? Are they selling products through their email.
You can brainstorm ideas from reading their emails to set up something to fit your style and approach. You may not have the time and resources to create a newsletter like these established websites, so don't set your goals and expectations too high when you are just starting out.
Take notes but don't copy!
It's important to thoroughly research your competition, but don't perform your research just to copy every single thing they did. If you want to stand out and become an authority in your niche, you don't want to build a cookie cutter website (pun intended).
The purpose of your research is to explore elements of their website and see what works well.
When you are taking notes you can list out certain elements that stand out to you on each site.
What immediately grabs your attention?
What products do they offer?
What color schemes do they use?
How do they implement their CTAs?
How is their website set up?
Are they social?
Your research doesn't have to stop there
These are just a few things you can look for while taking notes during your research. It really all depends on your niche and what you are looking for in a website.
Don't just look at the good things you see on their site either. Look at the things you don't like. What can they improve on? What are they lacking? Then take those notes and implement that change into your website. This will give you a great start and a better edge over your competitors.
You can also go above and beyond and conduct your research through SEMRush if you want more in-depth results. SEMRush provides you with site competition results as well as what top keywords they are ranking for. You get 10 free searches and then you will have to upgrade to see even more.
I hope you found some value in this post. How have you been able to conduct competitor research? Any special tools or techniques? Please feel free to share.
Recent Comments
24
Really great blog Josephine. Lots of solid recommendations for scoting out the competition. I found a lot of what you recommended useful and will be implementing them.
I have given my email address to lots of people I see as my competitors. It gives me an idea of how they approach things but as you rightly say you cannot copy but you can get ideas which you then present in your own way.
With Grace and Gratitude
Karen
I have as well Karen. But yes copying exactly what our competitors do will only get us booted off of Google rankings. We also lose trust with our potential clients.
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This is a very helpful post. I didn't do enough research starting out but I think I'm gaining at this point by paying more attention.
Cheers!
Glad I could help! It is never too late to start your research. You want to improve your website continuously, so it is good always to go back and look at where you stand against your competitors.