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Good online marketing strategies begin with competitor analysis. Who are your competitors? What will it take to dominate them in your online space? In my Smackdown Series, I show you how to research your competitors so that you can clearly develop a marketing strategy based on your findings.

Why is competitor analysis important? Because without knowing what you are up against, you could waste a lot of time and resources in a misguided internet marketing strategy. Say you are  a brick and mortar home brewing supply store in St. Louis about to open an ecommerce store online. You may think your competitors are other home brewing supply stores in the St. Louis metro area. But who are your competitors online? While your St. Louis competitors may be easier to dominate, your online competitors could be a different story and require a different strategy. In Part 1 of the Smackdown, I will show you how to find these online competitors in your industry.

Knowing who your competitors are is only the first part of the battle. Now you need to know their strategies and progress in their online marketing efforts. Luckily for us, there are free ways to research this online, you just need to know how. I show you this in Part 2, where we take a look at your competitors’ link building strategy and content indexed by the search engines.

Finally, you’ll want to know what your competitors are doing in the social media space. There are key areas to analyze, which I outline in Part 3 of the Competitor Smackdown.

Ready to get started? Use the Competitor Research Worksheet I created below to track your findings through each of the Smackdowns.

The best strategies are informed, and here’s how to get there in three steps. Let the Smackdown begin!

Step 1: Using Google for Competitive Research

Step 2: Your Competitors’ Link Strategy & Indexed Content

Step 3: Analyze Your Competitors’ Social Media Strategy
About the Author

Aaron Stevens is an Internet Marketing Strategist at The Loud Few who specializes in search engine marketing strategy. You can learn more about him here or follow him on twitter at twitter.com/MarmadukeBrew.