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Analyzing and Tracking Your Competitors

Guest post by: Warren Wooden

Article Overview: Competitive analysis and competitive tracking are two of the more advanced Internet marketing techniques that are available to you, and by implementing them early you will be giving yourself tools with which to grow your business further and faster than those who choose to ignore them, or simply not use them at all.

Analyzing and Tracking Your Competitors

I know you most likely feel like there's enough to do running and maintaining business without adding additional tasks, but competitive analysis and tracking should also be part of your business strategy, after all unless you know where your competitors are, it's unlikely that you'll overtake them, and even if you do you most likely won't even know that it happened, nor will you realize it, when they then in turn overtake you. Competition is healthy and keeps you on top of your game. It's a good way to keep your business fresh and innovative, continually trying out new ideas to improve upon your business model. You can be assured that they (the competition) are most likely keeping in on you; I know I am if you're in my niche.

If you currently rank anywhere on the top three pages of Google for your primary keyword I highly recommend printing out a list of who currently occupies all 30 positions on the three pages. Set up a schedule to track your progress and mark out your movement on that chart up or down. This way you always know exactly where you are, and exactly who's next in front of you. If you only focus on overtaking a single person on that list it should be the person directly in front of you, you might also want to celebrate the small successes and reward yourself in some way, to make it fun.

Internet marketing isn't complicated, and neither is search engine optimization. They both follow a certain set of rules and by following those rules we know exactly what steps are needed in order to outrank our competition, whether that be more backlinks, more content, or perhaps a more effective use of our SEO techniques being implemented onsite.

There is quite a bit of information available to you online regarding your competitors, I personally know this to be true, because I have detailed files of all of my competitors, and furthermore I know exactly what steps are needed for me to overtake them, which helps ensure that my strategy lines up with my goals of being on top.

You might be thinking that you are at a distinct disadvantage, because your competitors have the benefit of having been on top for quite some time, or perhaps have had many years with which to build content and develop relationships. Now while this might be true, there is a flipside that works in your favor, generally many of these sites have grown accustomed to holding the position that they currently hold, and in many cases aren't prepared when a newcomer overtakes them and continues their movement upward through the search engine rankings.

Competitive analysis and competitive tracking are two of the more advanced Internet marketing techniques that are available to you, and by implementing them early you will be giving yourself tools with which to grow your business further and faster than those who choose to ignore them, or simply not use them at all.

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Article Tags: business, competition, competitive analysis, internet marketing, search engine optimization, tracking



Related Forum Posts
Re: Congress To Make eBay A Rat -- Good Idea or Bad Idea?? - Hi GT, I agree with you. Competitors can use this against each other which is not good for business
Re: Testing and Tracking Online Marketing Strategies - Hi Jeff, Thanks for posting this. Analyzing is no problem and I do use Google and statcounter for this. I think I fail in the testing step. How do you test. Let's take TEs for example, .- When you promote a squeeze page, I can track the sign ups, but how long do you put it there? - I admit, sometimes I forget a page, and it take a few months before I replace it, how many clicks is a good performance? - Do you use the same page (different code) on several TEs or different pages at the same time? More of this to come...
Re: SEO... - 1: Find the Best Keywords 2: Discover Your Competitors 3: Optimize Your Title 4: Optimize Your META Tags 5: Use Headings 6: Use Title and ALT Attributes 7: Nomenclatures 8: Create a Site Map Page 9: Include a robots.txt File 10: Install a sitemap.xml for Google MySQL/Oracle:
How to Make Management Profile? - Here are some tips to make a management profile which helps to attract lenders to invest in your business: 1- Tile i.e. Name of the Business 2- Legal structure of the company 3- When did it start its operation? i.e. DD/MMM/YYYY 4- Shareholders and Directors detail (if any) i.e. Name of shareholders, No. of shares and its percentage 5- Name of the Board of Directors Name and short brief about them 6- Current Manpower i.e. in numbers 7- Management and their short profile i.e. name, designation, experience and qualification 8- What services you are offering? Write it down. 9- Your Competitors 10- Main clients or Targeted clients
Re: From $0.30 to $300 / Day on Google AdSense Part 1 - How To M - HI Evan, Look forward to hearing more. I like the point that you brought out with "testing." Google has some amazing tools that can help website owners track everything. From Google Adsense reporting to Google Analytic to Google Conversion and most recently Google Goal Tracking. Between all of those tools a website owner should know exactly what type of traffic is converting & making them money and what type of traffic is not. I even use Google PPC to estimate organic search engine traffic! Website owners would do well to follow your lead and create a base, and then test off that base in regards to advertising. Jeff


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