| Studies
& Opinions
Who Are
Your Online Competitors?
If you use a suitable keyword for your business
at any of the major search engines or at a URL index Website, your
search request will retrieve a very long list of sites. And that
list could be totally different if you had used a different relevant
keyword. In fact, your site may not even be on either list. So who
are your online competitors?
To answer the question, we first need to define
online competitors. These are Websites that your potential customers
visit before arriving at your site or go to after leaving your site.
Obviously, there must be a significant pattern in behaviors of potential
customers for such traffic information to have any value. In principle,
one would expect some traffic patterns (i.e., the roads that lead
to networked competitors, as Websites are linked to each other through
referral links and search-engine-result lists). Thus, the question
becomes how can one measure such a pattern and how strong is it?
There are at least two ways of determining patterns
of networked competitors using statistical modeling. The first is
based primarily on analyzing the behavior of Internet users as they
surf the Web. Alexa.com has pioneered
this approach by analyzing traffic data that they capture while
crawling the Internet, as well as data based on the Alexa toolbar.
The second is based on estimating the value of keywords implicit
in search-engine rankings. The value of a keyword to you depends
on its relevance to your business, search popularity of the keyword,
the rank of your site on the keyword-search result, and the search
engines used.
The information derived from competitor analysis
can help you improve your product/service pricing strategy and tactics.
Moreover, spillover from a competitor’s advertising campaign can
potentially explain traffic spikes in visitors to your site.
Fortunately, the Alexa.com information is available
at no charge. It is hard to believe that it will stay free for much
longer, so grab it while you can.
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