by Jonathan Marshall Knowing your competitors and what kind of time and financial investment they are making into their online marketing is almost as important your own marketing strategy. If you have a good idea of what you're up against, you can make better decisions about where and how to invest your own time and money. You will also have a decent indicator of how quickly you might be able to see results from your efforts. It's possible to develop a decent SEO strategy without looking at your competitors simply by having a firm understanding of the online competitive landscape. That being said, there will always be certain aspects of your SEO campaign that will need to be tailored specifically to outperform those you are up against. It's important to learn as much as you can as early as you can so the bulk of your marketing campaign will be focused in the right direction. No sense starting down one path only to have to back track and go down another because you missed an important piece of information. When analyzing your competition, be sure to try to fully grasp what they are doing and why. They may target an audience slightly different than what you are used to, or they could simply be doing the wrong thing. Either way, you want to learn from them- not copy them. Build your own strategy based on that knowledge from your research. Accessing the competition will give you a good idea of who they are, where they are, what they are doing, what's right or wrong about their campaign and what is or isn't effective.

This information can then be incorporated into the other areas of your research to help you develop a search engine optimization campaign that will help you succeed, not just with the search engines but for your visitors as well. When analyzing your competition there are three types of competitors you should review: Those naturally ranked in the search results, those dominating the paid ad results, and those that are offline but targeting your same audience. Naturally ranked competitors Who's dominating the top results for your keywords? Run several searches for a variety of keyword phrases to see who keeps coming up. While performing these searches you'll often find that certain keywords end up producing results entirely different from what you had expected. You may even find that some of these keywords simply are not worth going after. This is not because of the quality of the competition, but because the search results are so far removed from hitting your target audience. It makes no sense to invest in phrases that your audience will never search for. Once you find keywords that produce a good list of competitors you can then move to analyzing the competition itself.

Look for patterns of one or more sites routinely showing up in the top 10 for quality phrases. What do you see? Are these sites small with little or no name recognition or are they the giants of your industry? The difference between the two can mean a substantial difference in the marketing investment you need to make. Smaller, lesser-known sites won't have deep pockets, while the giants certainly do, and likely invest quite a bit in their marketing efforts. Once you know what you are up against for all your various keywords you have a choice to make. Will you compete on the same level as those with large marketing budgets? Or will you compete on a smaller level against other sites in that same range? If you have deep enough pockets then by all means, compete on that level. If not, then don't try to be a David up against Goliath. A good strategy is to begin your efforts on a more manageable scale that will ultimately start bringing in returns sooner rather than later, producing quality results and increased sales. Once you have that foundation, you can begin to work into the more competitive realms.