Christian Real Estate Blog

How to Scope out a Competitors Website -- And Learn From it!

It's always fun and interesting to check out what your competitors are up to. When you type in a search for your keywords, who comes up? Are your competitors ahead of you or below you? Why? Do you know what kind of traffic they get? Do you know how many liks are coming into their site?

These are all important questions to ask. In order to be competitive in the online world, you have to know the strategy of your opponent.

Here are a list of some things you can do really KNOW your competitor:

1. First of all, you must decide who your competition is. Do some searches on Google. Try to focus on the websites that rank higher than yours. These are the ones that you'll want to zero in on. It will give you a goal... how do I out rank, and out sell these guys.

2. Do a thorough examination of their website. What do you like or don't like? Write down your findings. This step alone should give you plenty of things to work on. Go over your thoughts on the competition and take the best parts of both sites, and try to implement them to your advantage.

3. Why is that competitors website ranking so high? Find out. Here are some tools to use:

a. Check out their link popularity with the free market leap link popularity tool

b. Analyze their back link with the free Back Link Analyzer

c. My personal favorite and by far the most effective for analyzing links is: Optilink

d. If you want the cheaters method, use this all in one tool: SEOmoz Page Strength Indicator

4. Examine the titles, content, and linking structure of their site. How is it different than yours. See if you can narrow down the reason why they rank higher than you.

5. Is your competitor paying for positioning on the search engines? What terms are they using? Pay attention to the titles and descriptions. This will give you an idea of the audience they are trying to target.

6. Periodically check out their rating on Alexa. This will give you an idea of their traffic trends, and tell you instantly if they are getting more traffic than you.

7. Research the competitors themselves... either an individual real estate agent, or maybe the ceo or founder of the company. Get in their head. What is their ultimate goal for the site. Pick apart their strategy... Don't be afraid to implement their good ideas on your site. Don't let them corner innovative ideas.

Hopefully these tips will allow you to understand your competition...

If all else fails, try one of these Japanese inventions

posted by Justin Smith @ 9/22/2006 01:27:00 PM