Competitive Intelligence is a critical component of every business strategy. It’s important to know and understand your rivals to be able to take an edge over them. That’s why we at SEO Management start every search engine optimization campaign with analyzing the competition and provide our clients with an Initial Competitive Intelligence analysis report.
Competitive Intelligence is the process of monitoring one’s competitors to gather and analyze information about their services, products, customers, infrastructure, business tactics and strategies. Specifically we look at what tactics they use to rank well within the search engines, and how strong or weak they are in dominating specific keywords. Competitive Intelligence is beneficial in both short-term and long-term perspectives. In order to win over the competition you need to think a step ahead being able to foresee what your rivals are about to do before they do it. This is a fully legal and ethical practice. Every business somehow analyzes the competition. But a thoroughly developed Competitive Intelligence strategy is the most effective way to survive in the modern business world.
At the planning stage Initial Competitive Intelligence analysis report is a critical tool used to develop an efficient optimization strategy. It indicates the current situation on the market and the level of Internet competition in your business niche. The information contained in the report is extremely valuable for proper selection of keywords to target in the SEO campaign. By analyzing the competition for the search phrases that are most relevant to your business you can estimate how much time and effort it will take to win high rankings. When the competition is too fierce to win in a reasonable amount of time, it will help us prioritize your SEO campaign Strategy. With the help of Competitive Intelligence you can identify the means beating the competition in the Search Engines. For example, if you want to target a broad keyword that is too competitive, the most effective strategy would be to identify more specific search phrases (long tail keywords) that are popular with the searchers but don’t have a lot of web pages competing for them yet.
There’s also another way you can benefit from an Initial Competitive Intelligence analysis report. By having a close look at the competing websites you can find out what search engine optimization methods were applied to them. If a website that appears at the top of Google’s results page for a keyword relevant to your business has been optimized using 70% of effective SEO techniques this can mean that you’ll have to use at least 71% or better for your website to come first. Of course Competitive Intelligence is not about copying the strategies and tactics of your competitors. Everyone makes mistakes and so do your rivals. With the help of Initial Competitive Intelligence analysis report we can identify and prioritize what optimization techniques will be most effective at beating the competing websites.