Keeping An Eye On Your Dot-Competition

A clever marketer always wants to know what one’s competition is doing. Luckily, the Internet makes this easier than ever.

Although time consuming, one of the best ways to find out what your competition is up to is to first perform a competitive analysis. Start by identifying three to five of your online competitors and go about the task of systematically picking apart their web sites, all the while noting what they’re doing that you’re not. You’ll be amazed by some of the lessons you’ll learn and the kind of ideas you’ll develop to top them.

When undertaking a competitive analysis, these are some things to look for:

* SOURCE CODE:

How does your competition fare in search engine rankings? Perform keyword searches and view site source coding to get a picture of how your competition has gone about optimizing their sites for search engine rankings. If they have well-optimized sites, note which keywords they’ve used and see if your site is missing any of these. Also look to see if they using any techniques that you have overlooked. To review search engine optimization techniques yourself visit the Web Advantage Tip Archive.

* THE BUYING PROCESS:

If your competition is e-commerce enabled, go ahead and walk through the buying process. Is it easier that yours? What differences are there that benefit the consumer’s experience? Do they use any online customer service tools and provide a contact phone number?

* CUSTOMER COMMUNICATION:

How well do your competitors communicate with their customers in terms of understandable language, a clearly defined marketing message, and addressing the needs of their audience? Do they offer newsletters? If so, go ahead and subscribe! You might even want to find out how large their subscriber base is by contacting them about advertising.

* TRAFFIC STATS:

Speaking of advertising, some sites that have on-site media kits also provide traffic stats and demographics along with ad rates, all useful information.

* MARKETING EFFORTS:

Do your competitors have an affiliate program? If so, what do they pay and through which affiliate program, if any. What marketing partnerships have they forged? Are they running any special contests, promotions or incentives to stimulate traffic or sales? What kind of online advertising are they doing?

One excellent service when it comes to this kind of intelligence is AdRelevance, which offers accurate and up-to-date information on where, when, and how frequently your competition is advertising online. For a fee, they will deliver reports that show media spending, impressions, placements, and even the entire creative portfolio of your competitors’ ads. You may view their tour at AdRelevance.

Another way to find information about your competition is to see if people are talking about them online via newsgroups, discussion lists, and bulletin boards. To monitor newsgroups, start by using Deja.com to search for keywords. There are some other services that will monitor all discussion groups, newsgroups, and e-mail lists and generate a report for a fee. Two of these are MarkWatch and NetWatch, which is currently offering a free week trial.

And don’t forget our tip from two week’s ago called “Mastering Your Domain“, in which we described how to use Network Solution’s WHOIS and WHOIS.net’s lookups to do reverse searches. This way you can view up to 50 domain names that your competitors have already purchased and get more of an idea of what they might have in store for the future.

So Sherlock, get out your magnifying glass, trench coat, and pipe, and start snooping!!

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