By Dave Huckabay, Grabapple.com

One of the things most Internet Marketers like to check before deciding whether or not to enter a particular niche is the competition. If there’s too much, or it looks too difficult to overcome, they’ll likely take a pass on it. If it seems weak they decide to take a stab at it. That’s well and good, but if you stop there, you’re bypassing an incredibly valuable source of information about your market.

I think my point of view is a little different from that of many internet marketers because I make my money by selling products directly to customers. The information in this article is aimed primarily at those who are building sites around products, whether for affiliate sales or direct sales customers, but whatever business model you’re using, you’ll find something here that you can put to use…

Competition Is Good!

If you are looking at a niche, and it seems the way is free and clear, take another look. If there is no competition, there’s more than likely no money either. The chances of you being the very first one to discover a niche are slim indeed.

If you do a search for your new favorite keyword and you see a healthy mix of e-commerce, affiliate and informational sites, along with a full strip of ads along the right side of the SERP, you’re onto something.

Who’s Your Real Competition?

If you’re going to beat them, you have to know who they are. But it’s not as simple as searching Google for your main keywords and listing the top 10 results. You really have two kinds of competitors.

SERP Competition

(SERP = Search Engine Results Page)
These are those awful websites that are ahead of you in the search results. No doubt they are run by terrible people who deserve to be punished harshly, so I going to help you to do that. You absolutely need to appear on the first page of search results to have any kind of organic traffic. So every site in the first 10 results on Google is your competition.

Business Competition

These are the websites on page one of the SERPs that do what you do for a living. To clarify – some of the results for a given keyword are not really your business competition. They’re just in your way on the SERP. Here’s an excerpt of a SERP for the keyword Binocular Microscopes

1.     binocular microscope - definition of binocular microscope by the …

www.thefreedictionary.com/binocular+microscope - Cached
Noun, 1. binocular microscope - a light microscope adapted to the use of both eyes. light microscope – microscope consisting of an optical instrument that …

2.     Optical microscope - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_microscope - Cached
In industrial use, binocular microscopes are common. Aside from applications needing true depth perception, the use of dual eyepieces reduces eye strain …

3.     binocular microscope | eBay

shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=binocular+microscope - Cached
eBay: binocular microscope. … Related Searches: binocular stereo microscope, binocular, stereo microscope, microscope, binocular compound microscope …

4.     What is a Binocular Microscope?

www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-binocular-microscope.htm - Cached
Brief and Straightforward Guide: What is a Binocular Microscope?

5.     Binocular Microscopes

www.microscopesusa.com/Binocular-Microscopes/ - Cached
Binocular Microscopes are in stock and ready to ship! Huge selection, name brands. Visit our website or call toll free for more information: 800 962 6437.

6.     1000x Monocular/Binocular Biological Laboratory Microscope - built …

www.scientificsonline.com/1000x-monocular-binocular-biological-… - Cached
Biological Laboratory 1000X Monocular/Binocular Microscope With Built-In Mechanical Stage. Click on image to zoom. 1 Review(s). Availability: In stock …

7.     Binocular Compound Microscopes at Professional Microscopes and …

www.professionalmicroscopes.com/binocular_compound_microsco… - Cached
Accu-Scope Binocular, Trinocular and Digital Binocular Microscopes, Stereo Zoom and ….Binocular Microscope with 4 DIN achromatic parfocal objectives. …

8.     Trinocular microscope, binocular microscope, stereo microscope …

www.usascopes.com/ - Cached
trinocular microscope, binocular microscope, stereo microscope, microscope lens, microscope accessories, trinocular, fiber optic illuminator, stereo zoom …

9.     Binocular … - Biology at Clermont College – University of Cincinnati

biology.clc.uc.edu/…/microscope/microscope_features&care.htm - Cached
To carry a microscope: first clear your desk to recieve the microscope, then grasp its arm firmly, lift and support under the base with other hand, set on a cleared …

Competitive Analysis

So what do we see here? Not everyone is business competition. Results 1,2 & 4 are informational sites, and #9 is a university website. There are only five websites actually selling microscopes here.

It’s important to look at the SERP results from the standpoint of your customer. My customer in this case is in the market for a microscope, not looking to find out what they are. He is a business customer, and he will therefore be concerned with warranties, quality, and customer service.

In this case, there was not much work involved in deciphering the SERPs. I can see who they are. But that is just the beginning…

You’ll want to click through on all of your competitors to see what they are up to. Open up a document window, because you’ll need to take some notes.

For each of your business competitors, make a folder on your computer and give it a name that makes sense to you. Then create sub-folders in that for each major competitor. I normally do something like:

ABC site competition > Competitor 1

Create a text document and title it the competitor’s name, or a spreadsheet with a tab for each competitor. Copy and paste their SERP result into your document. Now click through to their site. Right click on the home page, and select “view source” (on a Mac use Command + U). You’ll see a page of incomprehensible spaghetti code.

Now hit Control+F (Command+F on a Mac) to bring up a search window and type in “title”. This is what you are looking for:

<title>
<meta name=”description” content=
<meta name=”keywords” content=

These are the “metatags” for that website.

Copy all of the title, description and keywords and paste them under the SERP result. Go back to the website and look at the homepage. Do they have a phone number listed? Are the various trust signals in place?

Trust Signals = Images and text designed to give the visitor the conviction that the website they are visiting is trustworthy and a real business. Examples would be the BBB logo, UPS and FedEx logos, Visa/MasterCard/AmEx logos, and PayPal.

Check out their “About Us” page – note any information they are giving away, such as physical location, sales figures, number of employees, building sq. ft., etc.

If they have a Contact Us form, submit a sensible query with a throwaway email address to see how they respond. This will give you a peek into their customer service practices.

Download any special reports, product literature, flyers, ads or brochures they are offering for free and save them in your new folder. If they have a newsletter, sign up for it.

Where do their product offerings differ from yours? Where do they match up? If you are promoting some of the exact same products, do they have information that you don’t? If so, copy it into your file, you’ll need it later.

What about the items they are promoting that you are not? Do they seem to be a good fit for you? If so, gather up all of their info on those products as well.

Once you have all of this information on your business competition, you can develop a plan of attack to counter their offers, if needed. In many cases, you’ll find their offering surprisingly weak, their website outdated and hard to navigate, and so on. This is cause for joy. It tells you two important things:

1)    There’s enough business in the market that even a bad website can pull traffic.

2)    At least that competitor will be easy to blow past once your site is up and running.

Do this for all of your real competitors on page 1 of the SERPS. Again, Wikipedia doesn’t count.

Once you have it, read it. Go through the owner’s manuals; look at the assembly instructions, read the reviews, read the warranties, and so on. The goal here is two-fold:

First, you are going to be familiar with their offerings in order to put together your own. Your offering is going to be better than all of theirs, because you are not screwing around. If you are going to build a page on the ABC cheese straightener, it is going to be the BEST page on the ABC cheese straightener. Otherwise, what’s the point? We’re not shooting for the middle of page two here, we want to be number one in the SERPs.

Secondly, as you work your way through all of this info, you can’t help but become very knowledgeable about the product. Not only will you be able to write better, more comprehensive product reviews, and sales pages, you’ll be able to do it more quickly and with less effort.

Competitors – Your Content Creation Engine

Now let’s take another look at your first competitor, but this time from another standpoint. Now you have all of their content and all of their competitors’ content as well, so you are in a better position to judge their offering.

Go back to their web site. Are they doing anything cool with their content that you can duplicate?

If they are selling the exact same products as you, take another look at their listing and their supporting documentation. If you followed the steps I gave you earlier in this section for all of your page one competitors, odds are that you have lot more and a lot better info than they do.

Are they selling a different, competing product? Find out everything you can about it. Look at the Amazon reviews for it, and make note of any valid complaints. You can use this information in product comparison article, and you may consider adding this product to your site.

(If you do a comparison article, go the extra mile. Do something that makes the article stand out, like an infographic or a chart. Even a table of specifications is more effort than a lot of people put in.)

Keep notes on all of this, then move along to your next competitor. Do the above for all of them, and a picture will begin to emerge. It is an image of your market, as it currently exists on page 1 of Google.

This second go-round through their sites may seem superfluous at first, but trust me, it’s not. The information you gathered on your first pass through their sites informs the second pass. You see both similarities and differences in approach and content, and get a feel for what you might be able to incorporate on your own website.

Making your site the best of the bunch

You’ll want to go through the following procedure with your home page, and with all of your main category and other money pages. I know it seems like a lot of work, but it actually reduces the total amount of work you have to put into your site.

You want your site to outrank all of the others for your main topic keywords, right? Off-site SEO is a topic for another post entirely, but I can tell you this with no fear of contradiction:

All other factors being equal, the page with the better content will usually rank higher, with less work.

Hate building links? Me too, and that’s why I load up my product pages with as much useful information as I can put together. So here we go…

Start with the meta tags. Do your competitors have a twist that might make your listing stand out? Are they using keywords in their title and descriptions? For example, I usually put my toll free number in my description. This converts a lot of browsers into buyers for me, and I don’t have to worry if someone else site is better if my prospect sees me in the SERPS and just picks up the phone. Our kill rate on phone contacts is very very high.

(By the way, if you are going to set things up so that you actually talk to your customers, you better know your products inside and out.)

Take a look at the keywords meta tag too. Even though this tag has been deprecated by Google, it still gives a peek into what words your competitors think are important. When you see one that seems out of place or unusual, you may want to take a minute and run it though your favorite keyword tool. It’s there for a reason. Maybe the other guy hit on something that you want to explore.

Product and Category Pages

For each product or product category, take all of the info you have gathered and compile it. It’s unlikely that all of your competitors have all of the information that you have. Now you can write the best possible page on / review of your product. Make your page the best, most comprehensive of the bunch.

• Use sub-headings (keywords included, please!), bullet points and tables where they fit the information type.
• If you have a chance to show something with a graphic, do it.
• Link out where it makes sense to warranties, manuals or assembly drawings.
• You can’t use other peoples’ reviews word for word, but you can paraphrase them as way of delivering more information to your audience: “Some people say that the filter is hard to change, but we found that simply pushing in on the release lock before pushing the button is key.”

In addition to writing up the best product pages on the web, you should also consider making a resource page for major products. Depending on your site structure, this can also be your category page. This page should include the following:

• Information on the product category or type as a whole
• Links (with keyword-rich handwritten excerpts) to individual product pages / reviews
• Links to product manuals, warranties, and assembly drawings
• Links to articles about the products – favorites uses, precautions, case studies, comparisons, gift ideas, etc.
• Personal testimonials from customers.
• Information about the product / niche industry, and company information about the manufacturers in the product category.
• The latest news about your product niche – you may want to feature excerpts linking to complete news articles at the top of this page.

In Conclusion

At this point, you should see that you actually want to have competitors, and that they will make your site better than it would be otherwise.