Watching Your Competitors To Gain Marketing Edge

Many site owners never consider that watching their competitors can give them an edge when it comes to maximizing their online marketing efforts. Most inexperienced website owners simply think that all they need is good content, quality keywords and incoming links and they are set and ready to climb to the top of the search engine ranks.

The truth is that in addition to content, keywords and incoming links, your site needs to stand out in the SERPs with usefulness and offer value to your site visitors. Watching what your competitors are doing, and how they are presenting their content to site visitors can give you valuable inside information on what your site should and should not be doing.

The focus of your site's marketing campaign should be in finding a perfect balance in making your site appealing to human viewers and easy to crawl by the search engine robots. While it is important to maintain this balance, there are still many factors that you must consider when it comes to improving your site's exposure on the internet. This is where watching what your competitors are doing comes into play.

The first step in monitoring your competitors on the internet is to use a database or spreadsheet to record and track their statistics and the elements they employ on their site. There are many quality SEO programs available that will capture and record the basic SERP stats, but you will still need a separate method to record non-SEO elements.

It is highly recommended that you create a spreadsheet that includes the common SEO information, such as PR, incoming links, SERPs index, and keywords. In Addition you will record notes and information about the presentation of your competitors sites, and the elements they are using to make their sites more useful to their visitors. The types of elements would include but are not limited to: subscription forms for newsletters, contact and information requests, survey/poll forms, free downloads or links, chat tools, or any elements that would enhance the over all usefulness of the site.

Once you have this information of your top competitors, then your next step is to compare the elements of your site versus the competition. Once you identify elements that could be helpful to your site visitor, look for ways to add them into your site without appearing to be copying your competitors, but rather offer it in a way that makes your site more unique. And it goes without saying that when you see elements that could be detrimental to your site, or make your site less useful, include those notes to your spreadsheet and look for ways to either make those elements valuable or omit those elements from your website.