When you engage in SEO on your website, usually with the assistance of an SEO company, you need to identify who your competitors are. Most businesses already know who their nearest competitors are because they will have encountered them many times before in competing for customers and clients, and at various networking events and shows. However, in the online world your competitors could be completely different.
The business down the road that keeps undercutting your prices and stealing your customers away isn’t necessarily a threat online, even if they have a website. When it comes to the Internet, you could find a whole new world of competitors who you didn’t know existed, or alternatively you could find that you don’t have any online competitors (although this is very rare).
To discover your online competitors you need to visit Google.co.uk and start searching for keywords that people would use to find your business. The websites that appear on the first page of Google, behind Wikipedia (as that will invariably show up) will be the websites that you need to compete with.
You can narrow the search by entering the town or local area that you operate in, for example if you you’re a window cleaner in the Wirral, you could try:
- Window cleaners
- Window cleaning services
- Cheap window cleaners
- Window cleaners Wirral
The results will show you who your competitors online are, rather than your offline competitors.
Remember that the Internet is a different world with different rules, and just because a business is big offline it doesn’t mean they have any sort of presence online.
