The beautiful thing about the Internet is that most of your competitor’s sales tactics, advertisements and strategies are freely and easily available on the web – if you know where to look. This gives you a great advantage when going after a specific market with your products and services.
For example, if you know a competitor is doing well you can, for free:
- See the copy your competitor uses on their website and use something similar for your own site to test its effect on your conversions.
- You can try their products and services and see how well they work, what features and benefits they provide to their customers, and modify your products and services to be equally or more competitive.
- You can see what ads they use in Google adwords and track if those ads are profitable and effective.
- You can see their rankings in the free Google organic search results and review their results on page SEO factors such as the number of content pages, words on each page and home page (the more the better), keyword use in title and description tag as well as keyword density in the page copy.
- You can see how many incoming links they have and the anchor text of those links.
Use the data from the organic search results as an indicator of what Google is looking for when choosing first page results for the keyword. Use the anchor text to choose your key words and key word phrases for the search engines. What you want is a good description of your keywords in your incoming link text, while looking as if your incoming links are natural.
Verify your competitive analysis by taking each keyword you have chosen from your keyword search for your specific market, against what the competition on the first page of Google has done.