Competitive Analysis: Online Competition Vs. Offline Competition

Who are your competitors? Most companies we deal with answer this question quickly. They will name three or four companies who they consider to be their biggest competitors. The competitors they name are almost always their offline competitors not their online competitors.

You might be thinking this makes a lot of sense in your world as SEO consultants. After all that is why companies are coming to you to figure out how to compete in the online world. And this is true for the most part. Occasionally someone will ask if we mean online or offline but not too often. We don’t qualify the question at the beginning by asking who their main online competitors are because we really need to know both: online and offline competitors. They are the best resource to tell us who their offline competitors are. We look at the online marketing activities of the offline competitors both to determine their level of online marketing activity and to compare their web site to our clients. We learn a lot from this exercise; good content ideas, key phrase ideas and deep linking opportunities to recommend for our clients web site.

Our research determines who their online competitors are. The first step is keyword research. We don’t start online competitive research until we know what key phrases we will be optimizing for. We then determine the top 10 websites they are competing against in Google, Yahoo and MSN for each keyphrase both in the organic listings and sponsored listings. We choose five competitors for both organic and sponsored listings based predominantly on this information after weighting of the results.

The major things we look at for each competitor web site are:

1) On page optimization – page title, meta description, keywords, etc.
2) Off page optimization – blogs, social media optimization, video optimization, etc.
3) Linking – the number of external links, quality of these links, etc.

The goal is to see what the competition is doing and determine the best search engine optimization strategies to implement to get our clients web site to achieve higher search engine rankings than their competition.

Lynn Jebbia is a Senior Project Manager at ArteWorks SEO. Her focus is
SEO Strategy, Keyword Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Web Site Audits, Pay Per Click Management and Client Account Management.