The following is a guest post by Donna Fontenot, better know as DazzlinDonna from seo-scoop. Pay attention boys and girls; if you’ve ever had a thousand ideas, but don’t know where to start (who hasn’t?), this is a good one 
.
.Those who know me well, know that I have new site ideas nearly every day. Although I don’t act upon every idea that floats through my head, I do act upon quite a few of them. Occasionally, I’ll start a new site just on a whim, but I at least “try” to be sensible about it before starting one. Essentially, the smart thing to do before I waste time starting a new site is to determine several things:
1. Can the site make money – either while I own it or from selling the site later?
2. If the site can make money, am I knowledgeable enough to create the site, and am I interested enough to want to do so?
3. Finally, how hard will it be to compete in this niche?
This post will only concentrate on that last question – How hard will it be to compete? The competition level will determine if I have the timepower and manpower to make the effort worthwhile for me. If the competition is so tough that it would require a massive amount of time, energy, personnel, or money, then I may decide that it’s just not worth pursuing. If it’s still worth pursuing, even with a huge amount of competition to face, then at least I know what an uphill battle it will be – and I can prepare for it accordingly.
Each niche is different, so some may require more extensive research than others. Still, most niches can be scoped out pretty quickly with just a few statistics gathered. A quick glance at the top ranking sites within the niche I’m contemplating entering will tell me if I even want to do further research or not.
There are four main criteria that I check in my initial competition investigation.
1. Site size
2. Number of Backlinks
3. Site Age
4. Unanswered content opportunities
I generally compile the data for the first three criteria manually for each of the top 10-20 competitors into a spreadsheet. Once all the data is lined up, just a quick glance at the numbers gives me a good idea at what type of battle I’m going to be facing. The data can be obtained in any number of ways, but Firefox plugins such as SEO for Firefox or Search Status are usually the easiest.
There have been good tools I’ve used in the past that unfortunately are no longer available, so I generally stick with the tried and true method of gathering the stats manually and analyzing them in a spreadsheet. Having said that, there are a couple of tools that I’ll occasionally use to gather some additional stats.
One is NicheWatch (which requires free registration to use), which lets you enter a keyword phrase and optionally your url. Submission then returns the top 20 URLs ranking for that phrase and includes the following data about each:
* Backlinks to the domain in Yahoo.
* Backlinks to the webpage in Yahoo.
* Pages Rank of domain.
* Pages Rank of webpage.
* Keyword/Keyphrase occurrences on webpage.
* Pages indexed of domain in Yahoo.
* All in Anchor Rank of domain in Google.
* All in Title Rank of domain in Google.
* All in Text Rank of domain in Google.
Likewise, a similar tool is the Keyword competition check tool which also lets you enter a phrase and optional url. That then returns the top 5 sites with the following info on each:
* PR
* google backlinks #
* # google indexed pages
* # yahoo backlinks
* alexa backlinks
* alexa rank
* listed in yahoo/dmoz directories
All of these methods and tools return data that isn’t perfect. Search engines and tools often fail to give us perfectly accurate numbers. Still, when taken with a large grain of salt, and used just as a general overview, the numbers can give me a pretty good idea of what kind of competition I’ll be facing if I decide to start a new site. And really, a “pretty good idea” is much better than just starting a new site “on a whim” without any research done at all. I’ve done both, and the times I’ve gotten a “pretty good idea” have usually resulted in much more success.
But wait! I’ll bet you’re wondering about that last criteria that I haven’t touched upon yet, aren’t you?
The fourth criteria for analyzing competition is that of Unanswered content opportunities. Since this requires a completely different method of research, I left it for last. There aren’t any easy tools to help determine what the competition is for this aspect. This requires that I simply investigate top sites as thoroughly as possible to determine what they may be missing. What content haven’t they covered? What are they lacking? What content can I provide that no one else provides? If I can come up with some good answers to this, it may not matter how competitive the landscape is – I may be able to knock them all out of the running by giving users what they can’t get anywhere else.
That’s how I decide if I should tackle the competition in a niche. Do you do anything differently?
This Article, written by Donna Fontenot, AKA seo-scoop’s DazzlinDonna:
“Those who know me well, know that I have new site ideas nearly every day. Although I don’t act upon every idea that floats through my head, I do act upon quite a few of them. Occasionally, I’ll start a new site just on a whim, but I at least “try” to be sensible about it before starting one. Essentially, the smart thing to do before I waste time starting a new site is to determine several things:
1. Can the site make money – either while I own it or from selling the site later?
2. If the site can make money, am I knowledgeable enough to create the site, and am I interested enough to want to do so?
3. Finally, how hard will it be to compete in this niche?
- As initial questions to as yourself, these stack up as your number one priorities. You can read the Full Article here.
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