Preliminary Niche Competitive Analysis

1. Identify Niche Competition. The more high quality competitors. You can define exactly what you want your Search Engine to return using keyword:yourkeyword. Leave NO SPACE after the colon. This will give you a number of result lists of sites and blogs using your keyword.
2. Use Google Advanced Search to give AllInTitle. AllInURL, AllInAnchor Results. The lower the number of AllInTitle results, the less competitive the niche
   1. allintitle: ONLY Results that have the keywords in the page title
   2. aillinURL: ONLY Results that have ALL the keywords in the URL
   3. link: Shows links to specified webpage
   4. related:Shows pages that are similar
3. Check each sites Metatags, Keywords Used & Content Relevancy. A fantastic FREE tool for viewing the relevancy of competitor sites and their use of metatags and keywords.
4. Check Google Page Rank Data - Top 1, 2, 3 and 10 ranked web pages. Load Google Toolbar
5. Check Alexa Position - Load Alexa Toolbar
6. To analyse keywords on specific pages - use this free online keyword analysis tool from one of my favourite sites - Webmaster Toolkit
7. Build an Analysis Grid - Once you have your keywords, and competitor lists, check out the top competing sites. Look for:
   1. General site design and content
   2. Alexa Ranking and Traffic
   3. Check Other sites linking to them - Use your Alexa Tool Bar information box.
   4. Meta Data - what page titles, keywords and descriptions were used.
   5. Subscribe to their Newsletter - see how they are communicating with their market.
   6. Read through their press releases - get an idea of how they have developed their company and products.
   7. Consider signing up for their affiliate program. If you are really sneaky, selling someone elses product first may give you more insight into how to develop a better version.

Give each site a total overall score. You may be pleasantly surprised and find that although there appears to be a lot of competition, many sites are poor quality and could be easily usurped.

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