Battle against online business competition?

In the previous posts I've started explaining the conceptual preparation of your online business. Here I will continue on the same path and try to describe your options after analysing the previous findings.

Strategic thinking could make your success

Obviously you are not going to build your business around only 2 phrases but it will do as an example here.

What you need to do next is discover the competition for these phrases. You can do that by doing a Google search. Don't forget the brackets otherwise you will get results for every word in the phrase. It would horribly enlarge the number of results which we don't want, because you need to go through the results almost one buy one.
Alright, not exactly. If you are using Firefox or IE then you can download SeoQuake that will give you additional information about the sites in the list. The most important thing is to find out how strong these companies or individuals are.

Do your Google search again for the phrase and click on ’request parameters’ on the top of the list. The browser slowly starts gathering data...

The data from the left to the right as follows:

• Google PageRank
• Indexed pages in Google
• Inbound links
• Date cached
• Yahoo links
• MSN index
• Alexa rank
• Age of the domain
• Delicious Index

Although there are many misconceptions regarding PageRank (that I will not address here) it gives you an idea about how valuable the website is. Let's say, sites below PR3 are not very hard to beat. Look at how many inbound links and indexed pages they have in Google then you can pretty much make an estimation where you going to get and how much work it requires.

I strongly advise you to choose phrases the most relevant to your business and try to find the less competitive out of those, because the sooner you will be visible the faster you are able to deal with the big dawgs.

Choosing the right Online Business Strategy

As I mentioned above some websites are not very hard to beat. Some is the right word since most of you will not have a revolutionary idea and end up in a competitive market like electronics or books, etc.

Competitive market requires a lot more careful research especially when you compete against well known brands like amazon.com for example. Obviously giants like Amazon cannot be beaten, and you've got to admit that before you blow all your savings on advertisement. If you are smart you consider a partnership with your Goliath and figure out a way adding something to its service that would give you a slice of the cake as an affiliate.

I give you a good example:

Let's say you want to sell plasma televisions. No question it is a super competitive market and you would have to fight your way through many multi-millionaire concerns before you can start selling as they do.

For ’plasma televisions’ Google returns 198.000 pages for the UK. You can most likely find all well known brands in the top 10 and using your SeoQuake toolbar it soon becomes clear that you are very far away from competing with them.

So what you do? - You go more specific. Typing in ’Philips plasma televisions’ you get only about 9000 results and find many PR0's and 3's on the first page. Now, all you need is a supplier and a bit of hard work getting to the first page for this term, then you can start selling your televisions.

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