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Competitor intelligence

Home » Website Structure » Competitor Intelligence

Competitor intelligence Firstly, how competitive is your market? PlannedSites has recently finished a website for a company in a sector with very little competition in the UK market, this immediately gives them an advantage online. If you are in this position exploit it and advertise heavily, you are at a distinct advantage. Unfortunately this isn’t the case for organisations from most sectors, meaning that you have to be aware of how your competition is operating and what is making their website successful. Your competitors are really important in determining how your website should look. Firstly, your main rival may have a thriving website which comes near the top of the Google listings. They may also have excellent content and great interactivity for their clients. This gives you the opportunity to learn from what they do. Perhaps you can offer a varied view to a blog they write, or improve on the downloads that they offer to their clients. Alternatively, competitors may have a terrible website which doesn’t really attract many hits and is essentially just an online presence but nothing else. They may have what they consider to be useful content which is actually anything but. Poorly formulated websites can still, however, be a great resource as they may have a very large offline customer base. The improved resources on your website could be the key to attracting their clients to you. To compete online you cannot just build a website, sit back, and hope the enquiries start rolling in. You have to let people know about it by promoting it correctly. Just as importantly you have to have services on the site that people want to read, download, upload to, comment on etc. What exactly these services are comes through testing them out (particularly services that your competitors are currently using) and seeing which ones work. In summary you should aim to mirror the web activity of your most successful competitors. However it is important to improve on them, remain unique and, offer distinctive reasons for users to visit your website.

Competitor intelligence

Firstly, how competitive is your market? PlannedSites has recently finished a website for a company in a sector with very little competition in the UK market, this immediately gives them an advantage online. If you are in this position exploit it and advertise heavily, you are at a distinct advantage.

Unfortunately this isn’t the case for organisations from most sectors, meaning that you have to be aware of how your competition is operating and what is making their website successful.

Your competitors are really important in determining how your website should look. Firstly, your main rival may have a thriving website which comes near the top of the Google listings. They may also have excellent content and great interactivity for their clients. This gives you the opportunity to learn from what they do. Perhaps you can offer a varied view to a blog they write, or improve on the downloads that they offer to their clients.

Alternatively, competitors may have a terrible website which doesn’t really attract many hits and is essentially just an online presence but nothing else. They may have what they consider to be useful content which is actually anything but. Poorly formulated websites can still, however, be a great resource as they may have a very large offline customer base. The improved resources on your website could be the key to attracting their clients to you.

To compete online you cannot just build a website, sit back, and hope the enquiries start rolling in. You have to let people know about it by promoting it correctly. Just as importantly you have to have services on the site that people want to read, download, upload to, comment on etc. What exactly these services are comes through testing them out (particularly services that your competitors are currently using) and seeing which ones work.

In summary you should aim to mirror the web activity of your most successful competitors. However it is important to improve on them, remain unique and, offer distinctive reasons for users to visit your website.

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