Posted on June 4th, 2010Start your research by performing search-engine searches based on several keywords for certain businesses in the local, state, regional, national, and international arenas, regardless of the Web project’s expected marketing scope. For instance, if you are working on a Web development project for a local construction company that does business operation only within a 50-mile radius of its headoffice, don’t limit your research to local competition only. Alternatively, make sure that you also look for construction companies nationwide. If you do this, you are more likely to find a few great construction sites in other geographic areas which can be used for design concept ideas and also as a springboard for fine-tuning your existing project goals.
Keywords are unique phrases or words that define the place, person, or object that your visitors are using in a catalog, database, or search engine. For example, if they want to locate a new hairstylist, they could do a search-engine search for the keywords “hairdresser” along with the state, county and city name, for example “hairdresser, Chicago, Illinois”. After typing keywords to a search engine, their browsers then show results that list Web pages with those keywords. The results are retrieved from all the Web pages on the web that include “hairdresser, Chicago, Illinois.” in their page titles, page content, metadata, and headings, all of which were positioned in a proper location to attract more traffic. How do you determine what keywords to use when finding competitors? The answer is quite straightforward: Just think of the phrases you would use if you are a typical Internet user.
One good way to find related keywords for your web site is to check the competitors’ keywords, which are usually placed in the Description and Keywords meta tags within the HTML script of the site’s index page (home page). Not all Web sites use them, however good ones do. To locate those keywords, open a competitor’s site in your browser and choose View>Page Source from the browser’s pulldown menu, it then opens another window or tab that shows the HTML script of the displayed page. If you’re using Internet Explorer or Firefox, right click on the webpage & press “view source” to find the keyword and description tags.
To illustrate a good way to perform keyword researches at the global, state, and local market levels, you could presume that you have a Web client who owns an antique shop in Oakland, California, and sells Victorian furniture. Here’s what you need to do to assess the competitors:
1. When using search engine (for example Google, Yahoo!, AOL, Ask, or MSN), type the search keywords, for example, victorian, antique furniture, Oakland.
The local search should include the client’s town or city, which can help you to narrow down the results. Your results should be a list of local antique stores that also focus on antique Victorian furniture. Prioritize the top ten or twenty links and review all of them, make notes about the layout and content.
2. Next, you should expand the search by entering the following keywords: victorian, antique furniture, California.
This search won’t only include the city of Oakland, so the results include antique stores within the state of California. Your research is now geared more toward statewide antique businesses; collectors, buyers, and dealers; antiquing blogs and antique search directories. Again, check the top ten to twenty links and note any unique layout features and content that seem interesting.
3. For the final search, which is nationwide or international in nature, exclude any geographical locations in the keywords. Just search for victorian, antique furniture.
This last research step should give you links to top antique furniture companies on the global scale, and perhaps other sites that offer related products, such as, antique buying guides, appraisers, home furnishing stores, showrooms, and reproduction services. With this list, you could explore deeper than twenty entries to check more relevant sites, because it includes a broader variety of results that don’t always suit your expectations. By performing search on nationwide and even international scale, you have more opportunity to find better-functioning, better-looking sites compared to their local and state counterparts.
The bottom line is, by examining dozens of competitors in all geographical areas, you’ll see patterns to determine things that a site in your industry should have, things you shouldn’t have and things that can make your site stands out of the crowd.