Understanding your competition and market - 4 crucial elements.

Hi all, here is all you need to know when researching your competition.

There are four crucial elements to understanding your competition and market, they are as follows: Quantity of competitors, backlinks, demographics, and authority sites.

1. Quantity of competitors - This is the most widely known technique used for finding how competitive a niche is, however, on it's own it can be quite misleading (you will find out later on in this post). To find out how many competitors there are in your market you should do it keyword by keyword.

Find a keyword that you are competing for (we will use "killzone 2 cheats" as an example keyphrase). Go to google.com and type in "killzone 2 cheats" and you will get this page. You will notice that there are about 1.5million results for that phrase. This means that there are 1.5million pages that google has found that have the exact phrase "killzone 2 cheats" somewhere.

Now, if you were to use this method to find how competitive your niche keyword is then you would run away... 1.5million competitors is a heck of a lot! One problem is, that most of these "killzone 2 cheats" results could come from people simply asking for killzone 2 cheats, not competitors.

Another problem is that one site may have several, if not hundreds of pages indexed in google for the keyword "killzone 2 cheats".

Anyways, using this method will only show you how many pages indexed in google with the keyphrase you enter. Nothing more, nothing less.

2.  Backlinks - Now this is the most important part of understanding your competition and market. For each of the 10 sites ranked on page 1 of the results for "killzone 2 cheats", check for their backlinks with Yahoo Site Explorer. Click on the "inlinks" button and you will see that the number one site for this keyword has nearly 25,000 backlinks (inlinks are backlinks, links that pointing from a site to yours).

It does, of course, depend on where those 25,000 backlinks come from. A backlink from a .edu, .gov and any academic site like .ac.nz will be worth than any .com, .net, or org, and .info or .biz links will be worth even less. I would advise you not to look at every single backlink a site has if they have a ridiculous amount like 25,000... although it would be wise to have a quick look to see if there are any patterns.

The number one site for "killzone 2 cheats" has nearly 25000 links from n4g.com, which is news for gamers. This is good news, because .com backlinks are easy to get, unlike those stingy .edu, .gov, or academic sites. Even though they are just .com links, it would still be hard to beat this site because you will need around 25,000 links of equivalent value.

If you check the second result for "killzone 2 cheats" you will see that it only has one backlink, that is because this is a site with a high amount of authority (i will discuss this later on in the post). The third result has nearly 8000 links (less than the number one ranked site), and the fourth has 13 backlinks. This shows us that the number of backlinks a site has strongly correlates with it's ranking in google, although there is site authority to take into consideration.

The fifth page ranked for "killzone 2 cheats" has just shy of 500 backlinks; 6th has nearly 3,000 backlinks; 7th has 97 backlinks; 8th has a whopping 27,000 (most if not all of their backlinks are coming from their own domain name, so these links are penalized heavily) backlinks; 9th has just over 1100 links; and finally the site that is ranked number 10 has a tiny 16 backlinks. I must admit, this is not the best keyphrase to show how the number of backlinks you have is important. These results go to show that backlinks from one page on your site to another page gives you a negligible amount of benefit when it comes to seo. One good thing i can see about the backlinks these 10 sites has is that they are all related to cheats, or gaming (you want backlinks from sites related to your keyword, preferably your exact match keyword "killzone 2 cheats").

Finding out how many backlinks each of the top 10 pages have, where they come from, and what type of domain (i.e, .com, .edu, or .info) they come from shows you what you need to do to rank in the top 10 for the keyword. What i discussed above shows that you dont need many backlinks to rank from 2nd to 10th, but you will need a lot to rank number one.

3. Demographics - This is just like what market researchers do offline, but simpler, quicker and online. I use a site called quantcast.com. Quantcast shows how much traffic that site gets; what country, state, designated marketing area (DMA), or city that sites' visitors come from. Quantcast also shows the gender, age, race, no. of kids, salaries, and education level of the visitors to the site - these are called demographics. Quantcast can also show how many businesses that go to the site and how big the businesses are. Last but not least, Quantcast.com shows the lifestyles of the visitors of the site. Quantcast will show what topics the visitors to the site like, what other sites the visitors go to, and what else they search for. Quantcast also shows visitor loyalty through "traffic frequency".

Why are these measurements important? Well as a marketing major at university I can safely tell you that understanding all of these stats about your niche visitors is extremely important, you need to understand your customers if you want to have a high converting website.

Geographic location is important to know because certain offers you maybe promoting may be country specific (i.e. USA only). If the only visitors to your niche are Malaysian, and there are only USA only offers to promote then you wont make any money. The more specific data like what city the visitors come from is also important as you can relate your sites content to the visitors that visit sites in your niche.

Demographics are also very important because if the visitors to your niche are mainly male, then you wont want a frilly pink theme will you? The same goes with age and race. No. of kids in household is important if you are in any niche related to kids (e.g. Toys). Affluence is very important as well, it shows you how much money the visitors have got to spend. Level of education doesnt seem to important to me, as you dont need to go to college to be intelligent, but for some niches knowing this may be important.

Lifestyles are also important because once you dominate your niche, you may want to expand your site, or use your site to promote other niches that these visitors are interested in.

I hope that covers quantcast in enough detail lol. Anyways, what i do with quantcast is I use the top ten results for "killzone 2 cheats", and enter each of the top ten sites into quantcast search engine. Just remember to do a quantcast for the main domain of a site (e.g. www.killzone2cheats.net), instead of doing a quantcast for a subpage of the site (e.g. www.killzone2cheats.net/pageid=12/topic=cheats/refid=googlesearch.html). This should give you a good understanding of what your potential customers will like.

4. Site Authority - Authority Sites are sites that rank well for keywords, without needing many backlinks. Authority sites are sites such as amazon.com, wikipedia.org. These sites have high authority because they have a heck of a lot of quality backlinks that just keep on growing at a rapid pace, they also have a high page rank. It is hard to keep up with these sites because of the amount of their backlinks, and the growth of their backlinks. Even if you are just competing with a page of amazon.com or wikipedia or any other authority site, you will also be competing with their main site.

This doesnt mean that to compete with a page from an authority site that you need as many backlinks as their main domain has, although it does mean that you need a certain percantage of the number of backlinks that their main domain has. This is because an authority site like amazon.com provides a page on amazon.com with something called link juice. Link juice is where google gives a page extra recognition (moves up its rank) because the main domain it is attached to has x number of high quality backlinks.

If you reread and implement the techniques and information I have provided in this post you should have the ability to fully understand your market and competition.

Thanks for reading,

Wakkaoaka