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How To Find Out Who Your Competition Is | Small Business Marketing Research

How To Find Out Who Your Competition Is | Small Business Marketing

There are many reasons to find out who your competition is online for your small business marketing efforts including:

1. Knowing who you are competing against
2. Being able to target their customers as a paid advertiser
3. Getting good ideas for what might be working
4. Having a goal to increase your followers or web hits based on what they have
5. Finding new keywords to target in your marketing

BUT, and here is a big one, it is really easy to get discouraged and think that you are not doing enough. For example, a super easy competition website to mine is Entrepreneur.com. It gets over 3 million hits per month and is ranked highly for many of my most competitive keywords.

They (and I) are competing with sites like Inc.com, FastCompany.com and Forbes.com. Holy schmoleys, those are super big names with offline magazines and staffs of hundreds, if not thousands.

Which leads me to my first question…

Big or Small

Should you target BIG huge sites in your competition results or littles ones that you can gradually beat and then move up.

I personally find that trying to compete with HUGE sites makes me too sad to be very effective. I think, how am I going to go from 25,000 hits a month to three million and am overwhelmed at the start.

That said, there is something really powerful about going all Grant Cardone, 10X Rule, and shooting for the moon.

Either way, make sure to use what will work for you!

Compete.com

An easy way to find out who the big players are in your industry is to use Compete.com. They will give you a report like this to look at and see their web hits volume and who the big name competition is.

Researching Your Competition - Compete.com

That said, they do not keep data for smaller sites and so you may want to try a different service like SEMRush (one of my favorite sites for SEO research!)

SEMRush

They track many more “smaller sites” and give a much more realistic version of who your actually competition is, not just the biggest sites in the business.

Competing Sites | SEM Rush

You can find out top keywords, competitors and all different kinds of AWESOME information.

Social Media >> As I am going through this data I check on the site and see if they have links to Facebook pages or other social media! I keeps notes on this too.

Google Adwords

Once I have identified a few sites that are ACTUALLY my competition keyword and content-wise, I head over to adwords.google.com to get a comprehensive list of the keywords they are using.

I like to use the keyword planner tool and put my competition in there to see what Google thinks their site is about.

Google Keyword Tool

This will get me a big long list of keywords that I can use to start seeding my ideas. Hmmm…the site above isn't giving me great data so I switched up for this search.

Google Adwords Keyword Research

There are some that I like such as:

  • Crafts that sell
  • How to make money
  • How to grow a business
  • Advertise your business

The nice thing about verifying that they have comparable keywords to yours is then you know that they are an actual competitor with an audience similar to what you are trying to attract.

Your Ecommerce Competition

If you are selling something rather than just doing information marketing, you will need to also check your competition on the sales site you use. I use Etsy, but this would work for Ebay, Amazon or any other Ecommerce sits.

First do a search for one of your main keywords and then note the stores that are directly competiting with you for that term. Check and see if they have:

  • A website listed
  • A Facebook page listed
  • Instagram, Pinterest or other social sites

Start collecting all kinds of info on them too…check and see if their website gets more or less hits than yours. See what they do on their social sites to get sales.

Facebook Pages

One super fun thing to do with your Facebook pages once you get a list is to do a search for “pages liked by people who like X”. So this search is for pages liked by people who like the Handmadology Facebook page…

Pages Liked By People Who Like Facebook Search

This is great for if you are doing promoted posts or paid Facebook ads.

Wrapup

As with anything, you need to actually DO something with all this data. Here are a few ideas:

  • Get new topics for blog posts
  • Advertise on Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest using this data
  • Find competitive websites and watch what they are doing
  • Learn more about your customers and what they are likey to consume

It is really eye opening to take a couple of hours and see what is going on with your competition. Definitely worth the time and something that most of us probably don't do enough of!

Dots Divider

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