Researching Your Local Competition Online

Researching Your Local Competition Online

Author: Ryan Gilbert

So you´ve seen their trucks driving around town, your ad is next to theirs in the yellow pages, maybe you´ve even seen their television commercial running on late night cable. You know your local competition. You have a really good idea of how they run their business and you´ve spent some time observing their local advertising efforts.

What about their online presence?

• Do they have a website?
• Was their website professionally done or was it done by their brother´s son´s barber´s kid?
• Are they running advertising on the internet?
• What kind of ads are they running?
• Is their website search engine optimized?
• Where are they ranking in important keyword and phrase searches?

Start by checking out any competitors websites.

• Write down what you like about it.
• What would you do differently?
• Is it easy to navigate?
• If you were a customer, would you contact them based on their website?
• Was the website professionally done?
• Do they seem to be actively targeting specific keywords and phrases?

Next, head over to Google and check out what websites and businesses are coming up when you search for specific phrases related to your business. If you own a bicycle store in Miami - think of specific phrases that you think customers would use to find your business in the search engines.

• Bicycles Miami
• Bicycle Store Miami
• Miami Bike Shops
• Trek Bike Miami

Plug these in the search engine and make note of which sites are coming up on the first page of results. Do you recognize the stores? Are they your competitors? Are 1 or 2 of them coming up repeatedly?

Look at the ´Sponsored Ads´ that come up along with the search results. Make note of these sites. Is your competition paying for ´Sponsored Ad´ placement?

What does all of this mean?

By doing this research, you should start getting an overall understanding of your competitions online web presence. You should also start to see if any of your competitors are actively trying to use internet marketing techniques to rank highly for specific keywords and phrases.

Or maybe it just seems that everybody else has put up a website and left it at that. That´s sort of like throwing an unbaited hook into the ocean hoping to snag a fish. Most small businesses have not yet started trying to actively use the internet as a marketing tool. Because of this - the field is probably wide open for you.

With a little bit of know how, and a little bit of effort, you´ll be able to build an online web presence that will bring you a nice little flood of new customers searching for your services via the internet. While your competition is fishing with an empty hook - it´ll be like you´re casting a huge net into the ocean, hauling all sorts of fish out of the water.