Leveraging Social Media for Competitive Research
This is great advice from Google Organic Blog in general also offering good specific tactics to perform competitive research. Building credibility means knowing what the competition is doing (and noticing what is working for them and what isn’t). The point of his article is research which is an underused tactic. Read and implement! (This is an excerpt of the full blog.)
Know thy market
Sit back and ask yourself the following question;
How well do I know my market?
Hmmm, this is something that most will say they know very well, but do you really know it?
There was a time when I though I knew my market well. However after a few months I quickly realized that I was dead wrong.
Do you really know who your competitors are?
I have the luxury of reviewing current and future competitors because I also maintain a fairly good sized affiliate program. So knowing that I have the ability to review these sites regularly, I also have an advantage because I can do some competitive research on them.
Researching competition is VITAL. You have to know what they are doing, take what they are doing and see if it is working for them. If it is working for them, is it something that you are willing to take a risk on? If not, is there anything they are NOT doing that you could be to counter that? (*cough GET SOCIAL)
How can you quickly know what they are targeting?
Watch this and this for starters.
Keyword research
Ok, this is something that most already do, but how well you do it might need tweaking. Going after big money keywords is a great thing if you have a strong enough site with the right copy, but lets face it, not all sites were created equally and only THREE websites really matter organically, so if you place a huge emphasis on the best paying organic keyword and are not on page one, forget about it for a while and start looking for other keywords, like long tails.
Any natural web site is going to rank somewhere for something, knowing where you rank is important not only for the “Viagra” of your niche, but those long tail searches can be just as helpful. Not to mention that you should know what your competitors are targeting as well, they probably have some keywords that you never even thought of.
End of Excerpt
Click here for the rest of the post… it goes into some great content about the importance of web statistics
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