Figuring Out Your Competition

Whether you?re just starting out in the Ecommerce world or you?ve established yourself as a legit player, one thing you should always do is keep an eye on your competition. That doesn?t mean that you should mimick their every move, but if you notice that their website ranks higher than yours for similar keywords, browsing their website might help you understand why.

Try this: do a search in Google using:?site:www.yourdomain.com. This allows you to see what pages of your site are being indexed and how they look. ?The results should be keyword-rich and definitely include a call to action for users to click.

Do the same thing for your competitors by entering their site in Google search. ?Are their results optimized better than yours? ?Are they written better?

Granted, there are a few factors that you can?t really change about your website vs. your competition (like how old a site is), but virtually everything else is under your control. ?You owe it to your website and the future of your business to become the authority on your products and services.

A few basics: after researching your competition, make sure that each and every page on your site has the proper meta tags implemented. ?This means utilizing keywords that you have studied and adding them to detailed meta descriptions and creating title tags and page names with the right keywords. ?Also, you can never have too much good, descriptive content. ?Keep it fresh if possible, calling to action potential customers. ?Remember, you?re not trying to?match?your competition, you?re trying to?beat?them.

Following these simple steps will help your site start in the right direction. ?Next, you can think about diving into other important ranking factors like linking and using social media as a tool to drive more traffic to your site.