With your website, it is possible to see who is visiting your website. You can see where they come from, where they have been and how long they stay on your site. Keeping your eye on the logs is an important aspect of measuring the efectivness of your website.
Almost all businesses have compertition. It could be that you are a market leader, a part of a cartel or just a small player in a huge worldwide industry. Where ever you are, it is wise to keep an eye on what is happening in your marketplace. It allows you to be aware of trends, new promotions and products and gives you a better understanding of how your customer views you in the whole scheme of things!
The best place to start is the trade press. These give you a good idea of what is going on – and every industry has at least one dedicated news source. To find them, visit Google and type in something like ‘(your industy) trade news’.
The next thing to do is to ask a friend who isn’t in your industry to find information about your industry on the internet. Take a note of the keywords they use, and see which companies come up.
Finally, use services like compete.com and quantcast.com who give you a good idea of the number of visitors these other sites get. You can enter the details of your main competitor into the search box and see what happens. We often do this to get confirmation of the claims made by business owners and advertisers. Compete.com offer a range of the measured site’s top keywords – which is REALLY handy!
There are other sites like Alexa.com which do the same, but the major problem with these sites is they reach a level of popularity which makes it beneficial to tune your site to their requirements. This tends to exagirate the resultant website ratings.
