1. Define your competitors
Keep in mind your web competitors may not be your brick-n-mortar competitors. Use a few of your known offline competitors, but make sure most of your research comes from those competing businesses that are succeeding on the web. You can easily do this by just searching for a few industry keywords and seeing which websites always appear near the top of the organic results. These are the guys who have really put an effort into their web presence so they are worth copying.
Once you have compiled a list of potential competitors, use a free service such as alexa.com or compete.com to guesstimate your competitors' website traffic to see which are the true online success stories you want to emulate.
2. Find their backlinks
Google offers you the "link:" functionality built right into their search engine. Type "link:" before any url in their search bar and you will see all websites linking to that url. For example, if my competitor was Target stores, I could type "link:www.target.com" into the search bar in Google and see all external websites linking back to http://www.target.com/. This information can be used in many ways:- How often and where are your competitors submitting press releases
- What directories are they set up in
- What websites are interested in writing about/linking back to websites in your industry
- What activities are they involved in that is getting them mentioned (i.e. the first backlink returned for Target.com was about a 2009 National Conference on Volunteering)
- What is the structure for their family of websites (i.e. if you look up link:www.projectorpeople.com you will see a lot of their backlinks are actually coming from sites they are hosting themselves but split into external websites to create an immense amount of backlinks)
- Which social media sites are they using and how often are they keeping them updated
By piecing together where your competitors are putting in an effort online you can follow in their footsteps. Once you know which online magazines have quoted your competitors in the past, try to gain your own relationship with them. Or if your competitors are getting a lot of local writeup for sponsoring a Little League team, look into it yourself. Sometimes starting out in the web world can be overwhelming, so why not let your competitors do all of the R&D and you just benefit from their results?
What is some other information you have found from your competitors' backlinks that you never would have thought of yourself?
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