Now that you’ve decided who your target audience is and what they’re looking for, it’s time to take a look at your competitors through your prospects’ eyes.

While your target audience is your most important consideration, it’s a good idea to see what your competition is doing. Doing so will give you the opportunity to see what is and isn’t working on their sites.

How to Identify Competitors

Since you have both online and offline competitors, we’ll start with the offline competitors first. Brainstorm to come up with competitors within your geographical area, scan the yellow pages, and make note of any ads, commercials, or billboards you come across. Once you have about 10 or so, move on to online competitors.

Chances are that most of your offline competitors have a website, but we’ll ignore that for a moment and focus on which competitors come up in search results. Do a web search on the big four search engines - Google, MSN, Yahoo, and AOL - for a few keywords. Start local and include geographic areas with the keywords you choose. Now, think back to your target audience and what they are trying to achieve. Can you think of any other keywords they might use to describe their problems? Try a search for those terms.

When analyzing search results, there are two things you should be looking for. Are they showing up in the organic listings or under the sponsored listings? If they show up under the “sponsored listings” section (on Google, they’re at the top and right side of search results - see picture below), they are paying a certain amount of money each time someone clicks on their link.

How to Analyze Competitors

The best way to analyze your competitors’ sites is to put yourself in your prospects’ shoes. In step 3, you looked at what your target audience is looking for. Here, you’ll evaluate how good your competitors are at helping them achieve their goals. Specifically, you want to look at:

1. How does the website look? Is the text legible? Is it easy to scan and pick up the basic message? Do the graphics enhance the site’s content?
2. How easy is it to navigate? Will they understand where to click to find information?
3. How useful is the site? Can they do what they need to do?
4. Would they trust this site? Does it look professional? Is there a privacy policy? Is the company’s address and phone number displayed prominently? Do all the links work? Does it look like they keep the site up-to-date?
5. How convincing is it? Would they want to join the mailing list, buy a product, or request a consultation?

Once you’ve made note of the good and bad points of each site, review what your business objectives are and what your target audience will be looking for. From that, come up with a list of features you’d like to include on your site. Stick to the essentials rather than getting caught up in all the bells and whistles. Good sites are practical and functional at their core.

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