Do You Know Who Your Real Competition Is?

Who are your top competitors?  If you’re like most business owners, you can quickly rattle off the top competitors in your market.  However when it comes to online competition, your biggest competitors may not even be in the same business that you’re in, and yet if you’re not careful, they can still take bread off of your table.  Many business owners are surprised to learn who’s impacting their business online.  Perhaps you would be to, if you really knew.  Let’s look at how you can discover who’s in competition with you online and how you can turn this to your advantage.

Do you know who your competitors are?

Do you know who your competitors are?

Search Rankings

Search engine rankings contain a lot of very valuable information that if you know what to look for, can make your site stand out from your competition and make you lots of money.  Although search engine optimization (SEO) is becoming more popular, most businesses still aren’t aware of or focused on improving their search engine rankings.  This provides you with a great opportunity.

You really should periodically look at where your website shows up in the search engine results for your top keyword phrases.  These are the phrases that people use to search for the products and services that you provide.

Start by making a list of the top 5 key word phrases that people may type into the search engines when they are looking for what it is that you do.  Next go to Google and type each of those search phrases in and print the search results.

Identify Your Competition

Off-line, your competition is another business that someone may do business with instead of you.  Things are little different online.  Online, your competition is anyone who is in competition with you for your target keyword phrases in the search rankings.  Look over the search results that you’ve printed from the Google exercise above.  You are in competition with the others listed in the search results, regardless of what it is they do.

Improve Your Rankings

Pay particular attention to who it is that shows up ahead of you.  There are ways to see why they show up in front of you and your Internet marketing partner should be able to help you discover this.  These search engine rankings are based on a variety of factors, but the bottom line is this, by doing the right things, you can improve your rankings and make your business show up on top.

You can improve your rankings by targeting search phrases that best reflect what your target market is searching for when they are looking for what you provide.  Be specific.  If you’re an attorney, your top key phrase should not be “attorney” or “lawyer” because those are generic.  People don’t look for a “lawyer,” they look for a specific type of lawyer who can help them with their specific type of issue.  Think specific.  Think in terms of questions that your target market may be searching Google for.  For example, the phrase “divorce lawyer” is a much better search phrase for an attorney who practices that type of law to target than the generic term “lawyer.”

The top spot in Google will be clicked on about 14 times as much as the #10 spot.  Think about the amount of business that this represents.  It is definitely worth the effort to spend time researching the best search phrases, perform search rankings reports at least monthly, and work on the SEO factors that are standing between you and the top spot on Google.  If you don’t have the time to do this yourself, at least now you know what needs to be done and you can have your Internet marketing partner do the heavy lifting for you.

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