One of the first steps to take when starting a business is to analyze your market, and within it, it is very important to know who your competitors are and how they work.
Innovation and competitiveness
Tags: Marketing for SMEs , SMEs , Self-employed , Entrepreneurs
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Just as in the offline environment, the online environment requires a specific study of the competition. Sometimes the majority of our competitors on the Internet will coincide with those offline, but this does not always have to be the case.
Before starting, it is necessary to know that there are two types of competitors: direct competitors, who compete with you with a very similar product or service to get the same type of client, and indirect competitors, who target the same client as you but with alternative products or services.
First, we will focus on direct online competitors and to identify them numero de telefono mexico we can perform keyword searches that describe our products and/or services on Google. Generally, we will identify a series of websites that compete for the same terms.
Knowing our competitors will help us to know ourselves. In other words, defining our competition will allow us to know what the differential value of our product or service is, which will help us to detect opportunities within our market niche. Once we know who our direct competitors are and what our differential value and opportunity is, it is necessary to carry out a four-factor web analysis:
On-site SEO analysis: this study will help us to know which keywords and terms our competitors want to use to reach the customer. Depending on the structure of their website (the categories and subcategories in which their website is organized), the words they use to name categories and products and the organization of the internal links on the website (for example, those categories or products linked from the home page are the ones they want to give the most 'strength' to for their positioning), we will know the terms in which our competitors want to be present in Google. To have a comprehensive list of URLs, titles, descriptions, headers and other elements that our competitors use on their website to optimize their positioning, it is possible to use tools such as Screaming Frog .
Off-site analysis: this consists of studying the links that reach our competitors' websites. The better the quality and variety of the websites that link to our competitors, the more difficult it will be to compete with them. For this study we could start by doing searches on Google for those keywords for which we want our 'home' to rank and analyze the website that appears in ninth or tenth place. This way we will know what level of difficulty we will encounter in order for our home to be placed on the first page of the search engine. In addition, we will be able to identify possible quality websites that may link to our website (because they have already done so to our competitors). For this type of analysis we can use tools such as Ahrefs or SeoMoz .
Usability analysis: with this we can observe the objectives that our competitors set within their website, such as registration to their newsletter or making a purchase. It will also help us to observe if the loading time of our website is similar to that of the competition, if they use SSL protocols (https) or online trust seals, the types of payment they enable, as well as analyze their purchase process (the number of steps necessary to complete the operation). All of this will influence whether the user makes their purchase on our website or that of the competition. The more confidence we generate in our user and the easier it is to make a purchase, the more likely we are that the customer will choose us instead of our competitors.