Assessing the Competition in Internet Marketing – SEO Competition Analysis

One of the things I really liked about the subject of assessing market competition was was the anecdote about the 2 Internet Marketers in a jungle about to be chased by a Lion. One Internet marketer immediately sat down a put on a pair of tennis shoes he had in his backpack.  The other Internet marketer exclaimed, “What are you doing?  You can’t outrun a Lion!” The reply was, “I don’t need to outrun the Lion, I just need to outrun you.”

Although I’ve heard this before, I realize it is probably one of the most profound ideas of Internet marketing that you have to do only a little bit better than your competition in order to give yourself a better position in your market.  As you are competing for a good position in the search engines for your theme and category keywords, you have to be thinking about what you can do to outrun your competition just a little in order to succeed.  When one competitor comes up with something new, you have to also think about what you can do better.

So, in searching for a theme and category keywords, the object is to find a theme keyword that has the best traffic according to the traffic criteria of more than 80 searches per day, a phrase to broad match ratio of greater than 15%, and having less than 30,000 websites globally that are mentioning the same keyword phrase in their websites.   Using this traffic criteria, this narrows the competition down to make it easier to find weaker competitors within that niche.

Finally, by analyzing the competition within that niche, you try to find a weak competitor. A weak competitor is one that has a Google page rank of less than 3, does not have a listing in the Yahoo directory, has a small number of external back-links pointing to a page, and is does not have the keyword in the title tag or the url tag.

Finding at least one website within a miro-niche that meets both the traffic and SEO competition criteria identifies a weak competitor in which you have strong possibilities to outrank in Google (or outrun).  Finding more than one weak competitor within a micro-niche is even better and it is preferable to exploit the weaknesses within a particular micro-niche based on those factors.