Discovering Your Competition

Step 3

I have seen the same mistake happening over and over again. Some one looks for keywords, they find a few they want to use, then they Google the keyword to see how many web pages they are competing against. Sometimes it seems hopeless when trying to build small successful business ideas and you see thousands of web pages in the search engines when you search for your term.

It is very important when trying to build a small business online that you know who you are competing against and what you need to do to beat them. The good news is, the gigantic number of web pages found in most keyword searches are not your competition. Many times they can’t even come close to you if you optimize your website, your content, and your articles.

I always suggest using FireFox for web browsing and WordPress for site and blog building. Both have options ou can’t get in competing formats. The reason I suggest FireFox is because it has a Plugin called SEO For FireFox (it’s free). This handy tool developed by Aaron Wall is a configurable tool with 13 different signals ranging from domain age and Page Rank to del.icio.us bookmark and .edu inbound links. See the picture below, you can add as many triggers as you like or choose the ones you feel are relevant. get this tool HERE (it’s free).

Just a word of caution with this tool, you might not see this anywhere else, Shut It Off when you are just surfing. Only use this tool when you need to get definate information. Google isn’t happy with scraping during a search. It works wonders and will never be a problem for you if you only use it when you need to.

If you are not using FireFox you can download it HERE (it’s free). Click the “Upgrade” button on the right and download then install it.

Now that you have some tools it’s time to find out who your competition really is. Here’s a hint, it’s not the millions of pages you see in a normal search. Here is a great example.

I went to Google and typed stay at home moms business opportunity, no quotes, just the phrase. I came up with a staggering 67,300,000 supposedly competing websites. But, that is not factual and here is why. This is just hypothetical and not an actual search, example only. If I typed in Paperback Frogs my results could be tremendous. But the initial results are going to be websites whos front page include both words, paperback and frogs any where on the page. The same with stay at home moms business opportunity. Now the phrase I searched (stay at home moms business opportunity) has a lot of words that can be found on a lot of websites some of them not even in my business catagory. Simply do the same search using Google and you’ll see many of the first page sites do not have that same phrase written exactly as you typed it.

They ARE NOT your competition. They’re simple sites with those words on the page. Why are they not your competition, because they have not optimized their website, content, and articles for the keyword phrase you are wanting to use. You will beat them to first page with a little optimization.

So how do you find your exact competition. It is very simple. Go to Google and type in allinanchor:Your Key Words. In this study I typed in allinanchor:stay at home moms business opportunity. The number of pages went from the staggering 67,300,000 down to a manageable 111,000. The good news is, this number is still not your competition. In this case it is still much higher.

The next step is to go to “Settings” in the upper right of Google’s search page and click the down arrow then click “Search Settings”. When this page opens scroll down until you see “Number Of Results” click this and select 100 per page. This makes it much faster.

Now click save at the bottom right. When the search comes back up reinsert your search terms using allinanchor: and your keywords and click search. In our study in searches again for “allinanchor:stay at home moms business opportunity”. Then scroll to the bottom of the search results and click the last page. This may bring you to another last page that says “repeat the search with the omitted results included”. If it does click this and once again go to the last page. When you get to the very last page look at the top numbers. You want to look at “Results xxx – xxx“. This number is your real actual competition. In my case the results went from 67,300,000 down to a mere 591. I can ignore the larger number because Google did not display those results as relevant to your search. Those pages may be there and they may use your term but they are not optimized for it and are of no concern.

Now I know I can easily rank page one in the search engines for my keyword phrase if I simply optimize my website, content, and articles correctly. It’s not really hard to build any small successful business ideas if you simply follow a few guidelines and stay after it until you’ve won.

Next  Lesson:  How to Write a Small Successful Business Ideas Article, putting it all together.

Stephen