How
can your competition help you?
As
always, we want to emphasize that an online business is almost like
running
a business out of a store front. Just as you are selling your
products
and services online and keeping an eye on the trends in your
marketplace,
you should also be keeping an eye on your competition.
If
you had a business in a store front, wouldn't you visit your
competitor
every once in a while to see what they were doing, or have
your
summer help anonymously call them to see what new products or
services
they were working on? Well, that is the same attitude you
should
take with your online business.
Start
with a close examination of the "look and feel" of their site
and
compare it to yours. Is their site more inviting? Do they
effectively
capture and hold a visitor's attention? How does their
design
present the company? Then compare loading times: How quickly
do
your graphics load? If your load time is long, you may lose your
potential
clients right away ? Internet users can be impatient, and
there
are many other sites to visit. Take a careful look at their
text
as well: Do they have many spelling or grammatical errors?
Do
they overdo the formatting, placing text in bold, italics and
underlining
all at once? Or is their text cleaner and easier to read
than
yours?
Next,
take a look at where your competitor is linked. Are they linked
to
some sites that you should be linked to as well? How can you
improve
your links ? are there areas that you might be able to pursue
for
reciprocal linking that you haven't been pursuing? Also consider
how
they present their links: Do they have a separate links page?
Do
they include a hyperlinked logo to the site? Do they have a nicely
written
introduction to the site next to the link? Presentation goes
a
long way when marketing any aspect of your business.
The
tough part about searching for your competitor's links is having
to
search through each page of each site, and then having to keep
track
of that information from month to month. If you?re serious
about
tracking your competitor?s links, check out Lycos Link Alert
at
http://lla.lycos.com/lla (you'll need some info when you get there:
your
company name is superhighway, your user name is mark and your
password
is shtrial, all lower case). Lycos Link Alert is a
subscription-based
service, updated twice monthly, that will tell you
not
only who is linking to your site (and what page they're linking
to),
but who is linked to your competitor as well. Take a look at the
demo
site using the company name, user name, and password we gave you.
You'll
see that Lycos Link Alert packages all the information into
seven
different reports. One of the reports even compares your links
to
your competitor's links, all in one chart - so take time to browse.
If
you need more information feel free to email the folks at Lycos
Link
Alert at lla@lycos.com.
The
next, and possibly the least thought of, part of a competitive
analysis
is to see what your competitor is doing to advertise their
site.
Take a few solid hours during the week (yes, we said a few
solid
hours!) and really surf the Web. Look for their banners on
networks
and on search engine category lists. You may even want to
take
this one step further and contact each of the sites you find your
competitor's
banners on to ask about their advertising rates and
visitors
per day. This will give you an idea of how much they may be
spending
on banner advertising.
