SECTION TWO: MARKET RESEARCH
May 1st, 2009 |
EXERCISE ONE: CONDUCT A COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
|
EXERCISE ONE: CONDUCT A COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Points to Remember
- You want to do this for your own website. Then you’ll want to do this for your top competitor and any top industry leaders (at the LEAST).
- Use the data from your competitive analysis to inform your decisions with your website and marketing. Alter your content according to your website’s majority visitors’ demographics and go after your competition’s major link partners to get incoming links from them as well.
- A competitive analysis is useless unless you put its data to work. Make sure you take action on what you learn here!
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS & STATISTICS
Find the Approximate Monthly Traffic:
1. Go to www.quantcast.com
2. Type in your competitors’ website URL
Daily Traffic: Divide Monthly Traffic by 30
From Sponsored Listings:
1. Go to www.spyfu.com
2. Type in your competitors’ website URL
DEMOGRAPHICS
GENDER: At QuantCast.com, you’ll see a bar graph titled “Gender.” 100 is the Internet Average, so if Female is ranked at 125, that means that the website is 25% more likely to be visited by females than the average website.
AGE: Use QuantCast.com.
INCOME: Use QuantCast.com.
ETHNICITY: Use QuantCast.com.
REGULARS: Use QuantCast.com.
SITES WITH SIMILAR AUDIENCE
Simply copy and paste the “Similar Audience” list from QuantCast.com into the document. Affinity represents how much more likely your audience visits these sites than the average internet user. This helps you know what websites might be good potential partners or link partners for accessing your audience.
Delete any sites that are irrelevant in your opinion perhaps because they’re totally unrelated to your industry (and couldn’t make a good link partner), for example.
KEYWORDS: Go to www.spyfu.com
1. Type in your competitors’ website URL
EXERCISE TWO: RESEARCH YOUR KEYWORDS
Points to Remember
- Keyword research will help you with both your search engine optimization and any pay-per-click campaigns you do. However, the terms you target for each of these channels may be different.
- For search marketing, you want to focus on keyword phrases that have a good ratio between # of daily or monthly searches and the # of competitors currently indexed for that keyword (or currently optimized to show up for that keyword – a better indicator)
- A good ratio, as an example, would be 500 searches per month and 10,000 websites optimized to show up for the term. Or 10,000 searches a month and 500,000 websites optimized.
- If you can only look at the number of total websites that show up in a search on google (total number of results), then you want to target terms with less than a million results (unless they have thousands to tens of thousands of monthly searches and you want to give it a shot)
- You don’t want to waste your time trying to rank for really competitive terms or “high-level” terms like “credit repair” or “life coach” or any other basic keyword for your industry. Instead, focus on “long-tail” phrases that are three words or more. They have fewer searches, but are easier to rank for.
CONDUCT YOUR KEYWORD RESEARCH Niche Browser (www.nichebrowser.com)
1. Go to the Niche Browser website
2. Provide your name and email to download the free tool
3. Download the tool and install it on your computer.
4. Watch the training video provided after you download
5. Use Niche Browser the same way you would use a regular browser like FireFox or Internet Explorer
As you find keywords, potential link partners, or anything else during your research, be sure to record them in an Excel Spreadsheet or Word document for later follow up and use .
CHECKLIST: CONDUCT YOUR MARKET RESEARCH
- CONDUCT A COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS OF YOUR WEBSITE
- CONDUCT A COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS OF YOUR TOP COMPETITORS AND INDUSTRY LEADERS
- DOWNLOAD NICHE BROWSER & WATCH VIDEO TRAINING
- RESEARCH KEYWORDS USING NICHE BROWSER
- OPTIONAL: USE NICHE BROWSER TO FIND CONTENT, LINK PARTNERS, AND MORE – SAVE EVERYTHING YOU FIND FOR LATER USE
- RECORD ALL KEYWORDS IN AN EXCEL SPREADSHEET. INCLUDE ALL INFORMATION YOU CAN FIND, SUCH AS # OF SEARCHES AND # OF COMPETING WEBSITES
- DIG DEEPER INTO MARKET & KEYWORD RESEARCH WITH OUR LIST OF RESOURCES INCLUDED IN YOUR POST TRAINING MATERIALS
