Online Reputation Management For Dummies

Assessing Your Competition

It’s easy to get missed if your site looks like a faceless person in the crowd with nothing to distinguish yours from the rest of the brands online. You have to stand out in order to be noticed. I tell you more about branding in Chapter 9, but for right now, be thinking about your service and product offerings and how they’re genuinely different from what most of your competitors are doing. If you and your clients agree about what makes you different, then your keyword research strategy is clear.

Sometimes the best resource for figuring out where you want to go is to take a look at what your competition is doing. If you’re a solo-entrepreneur, this is an especially good opportunity for you to truly assess what it is you want to provide and to emphasize how you are different.

So charge ahead and look at your competitors’ sites. Appropriate great ideas and work with them until they’re genuinely your own. Once you figure out whether you want to be doing these same things, analyze what your competition is doing from the perspective of a prospective client. Ask yourself: Does this make sense? Is it complicated or confusing? What’s going on here? How can you do yours better?

By all means, take notes on what keywords you keep seeing in titles, headings, and other prominent places. Because most small business owners don’t perform a keyword search until they hear enough about it years later, you may find that there isn’t really a distinguishable pattern. This ...