I just started working with a client that has a small professional business. This is a location based business meaning her customers visit her. They are usually professionals and she has a lot of competition. When her potential customers pick up the phone book or Google her services they get a long list of her competitors. She wanted to build her client base without relying solely word-of-mouth referrals and stand out a bit from the pack.
The first thing I did was do an analysis of her competitors to see what they were doing in the area of social media marketing and the amazing thing was that they were doing nothing! Two of them had a blog but they weren’t rated very high. One had a twitter account and none of them had a Facebook page. Taking a closer look at their web sites we could see there was little web traffic, all of the sites had less than 15 pages ranked in Google’s Search Engine and only one competitor had any inbound links worth mentioning. All of this meant that the field was wide open for my client. She could make significant gains by using inbound and social media marketing to drive more traffic to her sites and potentially get more clients. I did all this analysis with free web tools available to anyone at grader.com.
What can you learn about your competitors?
Ranking: Start out with Website.Grader.com and simply put in the website URL and your e-mail address, go get a cup of coffee and when you get back you will have a complete analysis of the web site. It gives a website grade ranging from 1 to 100 and where the website ranks in the nearly 3.3 million websites it has ranked so fare.
Content: The first think it does is look for a blog and ranks that. It looks at how recent the blog articles are; how many web pages are stored by search engines and the readability level. This is important because the number of pages found in search engines increases a site ranking in searches and blogs are the best way to provide new and current content.
Optimize: Are the sites using metadata properly? Are they using heading that search engines can find and are they using descriptions in their images and pages? Again, these are the area that search engines look for information to rank a page. The more information the search engine finds that tell it about the web site the higher the ranking.
Domain Info: Believe or not but search engines use how long a domain name has been registered and when it is going to expire in their ranking calculations.
MOZ Rank: This is a 10-point measure of global link authority and popularity and is very similar to ranking given a site by search engines.
Linking Domains: The more links from other sites to your web site the higher search engines rate the authority of your site. Website.grader will tell you how many links the site has.
Promotion: Is the site found in del.icio.us bookmarks, is there a twitter account associated with the site?
Conversion: How is the site set up for attracting traffic and converting them to new customers? Is there an RSS feed? Are there conversion forms?
Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military philosopher said, “If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.” Website.grader gives you just the tools you need to know your competitors.
If you would like more information about analyzing your competitor’s web site or your web site contact Image Media Partners for a free consultation.
Photo credit: Frank Williams, Wikimedia Commons
