Expert List Building Blog

Are you number one in your niche and do you want to be?

You should because the rewards of coming first in the search engine results pages are huge. Many people will only look at the top of the page – and if they do not see what they want then the dreaded sound is heard – the sound that freezes the blood of Internet Marketers and Bloggers alike, yes, “click”.

Such an inoffensive sound but so “deadly” !

Let’s do some research then. The first step to world, oops, niche domination is to size up the other publishers in the niche.

Let’s concentrate on Google here because right now they are dominating search – so we pop our main keyword phrase into the search box.

So if we are interested in “dog training” we would put that phrase with the quotes as shown into Google.

Well I just got 9,000,000 results so that is one busy niche. There are many top Internet marketers operating there as well as many fervent dog lovers.

The Bums Walk Out

The simplest approach to competition research is simply to look at number of web pages there using your search phrase. Notice we did not search on dog training without the quotes- that will get you a different list of search results and a less focussed one. Many of those pages will not be about training your dog at all.

Anyhow the guys that call them selves “Bum Marketers” would have bailed out at the sight of the 9 million number for the results. They like fewer than 100, 000 web pages and really they like just a few hundred pages to compete with.

The PotPieGirl Walks In

A refinement of this approach is to use special Google search terms such as intitle and inanchor.  Webmasters who really know what they are doing will use our keyword phrase in their the title tag of their web page and in the anchor text of any links to the webpage.

So you could do this search in the Google box intitle:”dog training” and I just got 867,000 results for that.

Still enough to scare a Bum but not enough to scare the PotPieGirl.

Tell you about her in a minute….

And if you do inanchor:”dog training” we get 370,000 web pages

See how as you look deeper the strength of the real competition is revealed?

So what we do now is to combine these two little Google tricks by typing into the search box intitle:”dog training” inanchor:”dog training” and I just got a number roundabout 37,000.

Be very careful with the syntax of the search -you must take care to type a colon after inititle and inanchor and no unnecessary spaces.

This Google trick combo you can find at Jennifer  the PotPieGirl’s blog – where she mostly talks about getting Squidoo pages to rank well

Going Offpage

I was taught a different method for sizing up the competition – and it is by looking at the first page of the Search Results and testing the strength of the websites there

We want to be on page one for the keywords we choose, so what we do is look at all the web pages there – on the first page of Google.

And we ask ourselves, ” Can we beat them?”

And to estimate that we visit the website and look at the number of links they have. If they have 40,000 links then you will have to have if not 40, 000 links then at least a lot of links to beat ‘em. And that is going to take a lot of time and or money.

But if they only have 40 links it will be really easy to beat them

Yes you can get a rough idea of page value and links from the Google Toolbar but many links are not shown there because Google does not want you gaming their system.

So we go to Yahoo instead.

Yup, just go to www,yahoo.com and type your www.yourcompetitorwebsite . com into the search box and you will get a count of the number of links and information about them showing you how you can get those links too.

Yes You Can!

Sizing up the competition is vital for the success of your website. Most websites founder and fail because they are not based on good market research methods such as those mentioned in this post.

There is no surefire way of working out how strong the competition is or well you will do with any particular page of yours. Factors of fashion, social trends and dumb luck play a part – but the more carefully you research other websites and “do the math” as above the more luck you will appear to have.

So, now I’d like to hear your methods of sizing up the competition.  What works for you?

Alex

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