How To Successfully Compete In Your Market

A client asked me a question the other day about competing in a highly competitive market, what she called a “saturated market”. It reminded me of a story I heard while up in Alaska…

Two guys were sitting around a campfire out in the woods when a bear came crashing through the trees. One guy reached out and quickly began putting on his sneakers. The other guy looked at him and said “Are you crazy? You can’t outrun a bear!” The first man responded, “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.”

For a small business to compete in a niche market, you don’t have to be the best ever, you just have to be a little better than your competition. That means studying your competition, copy what they are doing right and adding a little more to top them.

There are some handy tools for monitoring your business competitors to see what they are doing. They are also great for initial market research.One is SEOQuake, a free Firefox and Chrome browser plugin that researches Google search results and individual web pages. It provides pagerank, backlinks, meta tag info and keyword densities, plus a whole lot more.

Another that we use is a keyword analysis tool called Market Samurai ($149). a one-time paid tool, not a monthly service.

Among many built-in tools, it provides a SEO Competition tool that evaluates the top ten competing sites for your keywords.

You can see the normal things like pagerank and backlinks (to both the domain and the page), but also the domain age and whether the keywords are used in the title, heading and metadata of the page, all in a quick graphical format.

Remember, rather than being the best of the best, a more attainable goal is to be just a little bit better than your competition.