Internet Marketing – Tips for Evaluating Your Competitors

by | Sep 24, 2011

Whether you’re working on a fresh start-up or you’re an established company, you know that part of internet marketing for a viable business is knowing and understanding your competitors.  To get the most out of your competitive analysis you need to include three components:

  • Identifying who your competitors are
  • Gathering the data you need
  • Analyzing that data

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Internet Marketing – Where Competitive Analysis Begins

So where do you begin?  You need to identify the relevant factors that you’ll be comparing between your business and the competitors as well as identifying the conclusions you’ll be drawing from the data and how it will affect your internet marketing.  Here are some simple tips on evaluating your competitors to help move your thought process in the right direction.

1.  Understand Which Metrics are Important

Before you start comparing the data for your internet marketing, you need to know what to look for.  If you don’t focus your efforts you’ll soon realize there’s a lot of data out there.  Do you want to examine total visits and all the traffic?  Just unique hits? Ad revenue? Search engine rank? Local relevancy? Link sources? Traffic rank?  Choose the metrics that are most important to your own internet marketing campaign and measure based on that.

Don’t worry if you wind up choosing the wrong metrics.  It will eventually lead you in the right direction and it’s good practice in understanding the process and concept of competitive research

2. Examine Recent Trends

Trends are important, especially on a local level for internet marketing where your user base or target audience is more tightly focused when compared to a regional, national or global market.  A start-up needs to pay especially close attention to trends because they paint a picture of what your audience is interested in now and where they may go in the future.  Examine your competitors to how they adjust to trends.  Try using a tool like www.compete.com to help you gather historical data for comparison on other sites.

3. Watch for Historical Trends

Historical trends can help you monitor the speed of growth as well as changed in consumer interest and spending.  For example, if you watch compare two competitors in the industry and note that they both have complementary growth spurts and down periods then you can adjust your internet marketing and traditional marketing to compensate for those trending periods.

4. Use Multiple Sources

We know the saying about not putting your eggs in one basket.  As your gathering competitive data, don’t use one source.  Use additional sources for information to help you create a strong internet marketing strategy.  This includes sites like www.alexa.com www.quantcast.com and www.dataopedia.com.  Having a variety of data builds confidence in your comparison and assures you that the work you’ve done has a strong foundation.

5. Repeat Your Efforts

You should routinely do a competitive analysis to hone your internet marketing.  Good competitive analysis takes effort on your part and you can learn a great deal by doing it once or partnering with a search engine optimization and internet marketing agency to tackle it with you.  However, you’ll learn a great deal more by making competitive analysis a regular part of your strategy building.

If you want to put your marketing into high gear, let us help you dissect your competition.  With the information we find, together we can revitalize your business.  Contact us at Tulsa Internet Marketing today for more information.