“Take
THEIR good ideas, and make 'em YOUR good ideas.”
--Steve Balmer, Microsoft Corp.
How to evaluate the website competition in your niche.
If you
are using a website to promote your business, or if you are planning
to build a website, you should check out the websites of your
competition.
You should
do this to see how strong your website competition is and also to
see if they have any good ideas that might work on
your website. You can't actually use their words and pictures
of course, but if they do a thing in a certain way it might work
well for you also.
Also keep
an eye out for things your competition might be doing wrong that
will give your website an edge.
Off-Page
Website Criteria
Free website
research tools that let you spy on your competition (and yourself).
Alexa.com
Alexa.com
measures the traffic of the most popular websites and assigns a site
rank to the top 20 million sites. Yahoo is the most popular site
in the world and has a traffic rank of 1.
There
are about 100 million websites in the world, so if a website has
a traffic rank of less than 1 million it is in the top 1% of all
websites for traffic worldwide.
Here is
a traffic rank comparison between our website Lake-Sunapee-Living.com
and our main website competition.
Traffic rank results:
The traffic rank for Lake Sunapee-Living.com is under 3 million, which
means it is in the top 3% of website traffic worldwide.
A traffic
rank of "no data" means that the site
does not generate enough traffic to measure. Alexa.com
only ranks the top 20 million
websites, or the top 20%.
The Wayback
Machine
Alexa.com
also has the Wayback Machine,
an archive of past versions of nearly all websites from 1996 to the
present. You can enter the
web address of any website you would like to view and then pick from
a list of archived versions saved at different points in time.
If your
competitors have changed their website often it means they are serious
about their internet presence.
Quantcast.com
Quantcast.com also collects traffic information about
the most popular websites.
Their information is much more detailed
than Alexa.com, but they only track websites that get relatively
high traffic volumes. They don't have data for many small business
websites.
Search
It! is a free tool from SiteSell that is a collection of the
most useful searches and web tools. There are dozens of categories
of searches
including keyword research, website research, content research, legal
research, and much more.
Two of
the most useful searches for evaluating website competition are Indexed
Pages & Back
Links.
Indexed
Pages search shows how many pages of a website have been
indexed by the search engines, and gives and indication of how effective
a particular
website design is.
Back
Links search shows how many back links (also called in-pointing
links) a website
has. Back links are an important part of website traffic building,
as the search engines measure the importance of a website by how
many other sites link to it.
Tip: These
websites that link to your competition might also be willing to link
to your site as well.
Search
It! is totally awesome! Click the Help link below
for more information.
On-Page
Website Criteria
In
addition to evaluating the off-page criteria above you need to look
at the site itself to see how it is set up for visitors as well
as the search engines.
Many
sites that have a nice design and look great to humans do not look
good at all to the search engines.
You
should also take a look at the
effectiveness of the competition’s website itself to find
out how well they have optimized their site for the search engines.
You should
also consider how well they have organized their site.
- It
it easy to navigate?
- Does
the homepage give you an overview of what is on the
site?
- SEO
effectiveness: You can check a few specific things to
get an idea of how well your competition has optimized their
site
for
the search
engines.
- Is
the entire site built around
a theme of related topics?
- Is
each page focused around a
keyword? Is the same keyword in the page
file name, page title, page heading, image
label, and
in a
text link?
- Is
each image properly labeled?
- Do
they have a site map?
If
your competition does not do all of these things you are probably
in a position to get significant market
share with
a properly
built website.
| Recommendations: |
|
| This
excellent free tool called Traffic
Travis can help you evaluate
your website competition by analyzing the on-page SEO of any
web page, and also the strength & quantity of back links
to any website. |
|
The
ultimate tool to evaluate website competition is Market
Samurai. This is
a brand new niche research tool that will let you measure all
of the competition in a particular niche, and will
show you where there are specific weaknesses that you can target
with
a website or with web pages.
|
|
The
best way to build a website to dominate a niche is with the
system we used to research & build this website: Site
Build It. You get all the tools and information
you need to avoid the mistakes of your competitors & build
an effective website that will enable you to compete with
much
larger companies.
|
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Can
we do a niche evaluation for you? Contact
Us
Help
us improve this website!
Do
you have a comment or question about the website competition
information on this page? Use the Contact
form to
let us know.
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