About the Author

Barry Hurd is a social media consultant educating business owners to understand emerging social media tools and the promotional trends around them. This includes services such as Google, YouTube, Linkedin, and Twitter on topics ranging from search engine optimization, online reputation control, and strategic public relations.

Learn From Your Competitors Search

February 15th, 2008 • Related • Filed Under

As children, we learn an essential rule of life: Learn From Our Mistakes

The problem is that many of us take this personally. You don’t need to learn from your mistakes, you can learn from your competitor’s mistakes.

One of the first steps of beginning a business is to understand your market and your competition. Compete.com allows business owners to look at some results for free and has a very affordable credit system (for $5-$10 most business owners are good)

They provide search and site analytics based on your site information and up to four other sites at the same time. All you need to know is a few businesses that operate in your market to get started. The site analytics allows you to see how many visitors your competition is getting, and the search analytics (which cost credits) allows you to see what search terms produce traffic to those sites.

So if you are looking for a search marketing effort- whether you are going to organically get it through search engine optimization or through pay-per-click campaigns, knowing what words work for the competition is a HUGE asset.

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