Learning From Your Market Competitors

Whether the idea of having market competitors sends shivers down your spine, or if you choose to plow through them, the fact is, no matter what niche you get into you’re going to have them. And they could number in the thousands! So what do you do to compete? Well, have you ever thought of learning from your competitors?

Anyone with any marketing savvy would tell you, market competitors should never be ignored or taken lightly. But they’d also tell you, you should always find ways to capitalize on their success, rather than blindly butt up against them.

Take for example, an obvious reason why you’d want to know what your competitors strategy is, your price analysis.

Naturally you’d want to know what products are selling for in your market before creating a competing product, or even finding affiliate products to insert into the market. If your product competitors are all selling ten dollar items, and your product’s price is way over that, you’ll have trouble breaking in unless you can clearly justify the higher price.

But your business competitors can teach you a lot more than that, and you should be eager to learn everything they can offer before completing your own market strategy.

Of course none of them will reveal their strategies willingly, but they’re still available to you if you know how to find them.

One way to do this kind of in depth competitors analysis is with Market Samurai. Using this tool will save you a lot of time and give you a broader range of statistics you might not normally get doing your market research manually. Market Samurai was created by Internet marketers for Internet marketers, so its results are right on and will take you deeper into knowing whatever market challenges you’ll encounter.

So with any market research, you’ll want to start with keyword analysis to find keywords and phrases that both suit your needs and give you a chance to get the best search/competition ratios you can.

This goes without saying. It’s the basis of all research.

But once you have a list of phrases you might possibly work with, then it gets really interesting. Now you can see what your market competitors have and are doing with them.

We can call this next phase “competitors intelligence discovery,” because now we can research how smart they’ve been using SEO and content to become major competitors in your market.

If you simply Google your key phrases one by one, you’ll be able to see the sites ranking in the top ten spots. These would naturally be you major competitors, and you can get a lot of information just by visiting the sites. However, a site visit might not give you the reason why they’re in the top ten beyond knowing the type of content they supply.

You’ll also want to know things like how well they’ve used SEO methods, how many back links point to their page and domain, their domain age, page rank, and how many pages on their site are being indexed by Google. This is where tools like Market Samurai can come in handy.

In regards to back links, competing site with .edu and .gov back links will carry more weight, as will sites with paid Yahoo links and DMOZ.org listings.

All of these things contribute to their success, and will need to be taken into account if you’re thinking of competing with them. But knowing these things and learning from your market competitors before settling on a market strategy of your own will save you a lot of time and headaches now, and in any future niche you’re thinking of getting into.