Analyze Competitor Quality

You’ve already done a lot to identify your visitor pool (search results) for all of your potential niche topics. You also know the size of the competition in most of your potential niches and you have worked out your R/S ratio (supply/demand) for the main keywords in your niche.

You may be a little worried by some of the results at this stage. Maybe some of the niches don’t look like they can be profitable– there’s just too much competition for too few visitors.

Of course you need to know how many competitors in total you have in your niche - but what matters far more is what the top ten sites in the niche do to attract and retain visitors - and how well they are doing it currently.

Why only the top ten? Because – as an Authority Site – you aim to be in the top ten results in Google, Yahoo and MSN for your main keywords and probably for your sub-niche keywords too.

It’s pretty much accepted that most traffic from search engines comes from the first page of results – most surfers don’t go any deeper. So your real competition is simply the first ten sites in the niche - not the thousands or even millions of other sites that Google finds and lists after the first page.

Take each of your best niche topics (say the top five) and enter the main keyword in Google.

Follow the top ten URL’s in the search results to each of the sites listed, and use this checklist to assess the quality of what they are offering the visitor:

• Content – how much is there and how compelling is it – is it deep, rich content or superficial and bland? How recent and frequently updated is it?
• Site design - does it look professional? – does it convey a good image? – does the image fit the content of the site? How easy is it to find your way around? How well linked is the content?
• Affiliate products – are there any offered and what quality? Are they well placed and ads used properly? Does the content pre-sell the products?
• Original products and services – are there any offered and of what quality/price range?
  

• Opt-in forms – what attempts can you see to build a list of subscribers?
  

• Special offers – what offers are there on the site?
  

• Marketing – what are the obvious marketing tactics?
  

• Articles – are any contributed by other authors?
  

• Syndication - has the site got a blog and RSS feeds?
  

• Interaction – is there a forum? Does the site allow comments and trackbacks? If so how much activity is there?
  

• Publicity - have any press releases been done for the site?
  

• Links - what other linking tactics can you see?
  

• Contextual advertising – does the site have AdSense, Yahoo, or MSN contextual ads? Are they used well – do they blend in with the content?
  

Update your master list as you work through the sites. You may want to use a simple scoring system to assess the results for each site and enter that in your spreadsheet.

When you’ve gone through all your top five niche topics on Google - stand back and review your results.

Check the top ten search results at Yahoo and MSN, using the same criteria.

Congratulations! You’ve analyzed 50 sites in Google across five potential niche topics. You’ve done the bulk of the analysis, and you should have learnt a lot from the process.

Already the information is giving you a much richer picture of each of your potential niches.