10 Search Tips for Analyzing your Business Market

Competitive Market Analysis Online

Understanding your market is to understand the problems that exist for the people in your market.  There are many powerful ways to search online to do this.

Tip #1.  Google Search – enter your keyword phrase for your market in quotes then type in the word “problem” OR “challenge” or “difficulty”.  “OR” is in capital letters.  For example your search term would look like this:

“make money online” problem OR challenge OR difficulty

Tip #2.  Find Forums in your niche where people may be searching for solutions

Search term to enter:

“your keyword phrase” + forum

Alternatively you can search:

“your keyword phrase” + intitle:forum  (in google)

Tip #3.  Check the question and answer directories

These are directories where people go and ask a question and experts or knowledge users will answer the questions.

Yahoo answers:  www.answers.yahoo.com

Answer Bag:  www.answerbag.com

www.askville.com

www.qna.live.com

Tip #4.  Article Directories - search your category of interest and note the popular articles.  Also the articles may reveal issues that are important to your audience.

Ezine Articles – www.ezinearticles.com

Tip #5.  Amazon.com – check the top 25 books in your niche.   Look at the reviews and carefully check what the people are saying both pro and con.

Tip #6. Review Journals and Industry publications – go to back issues for the last 6 to 12 months and look at the article titles.

Tip #7.  Look at competitor websites and check the FAQs. (frequently asked questions)

Tip #8.  Research all the Industry Experts in your niche- the top mentors, coaches, leaders.

Tip #9.  Find the top bloggers in your nice – www.technorati.com/blogs

Tip #10.  Tools/websites to check competitors websites:  These can show demographics of the visitors to a webiste, google page rank, and much much more.

Quantcast.com

Compete.com

Alexa.com

There is  a Firefox web browser plugin  – SEO for Firefox (found at www.seobook.com) that will show the age of the site, the page rank, the number of links inbound and outbound, and other useful stats about a website.  SEOQUAKE is another similar web browser tool.

Bonus Tip:  Various Keyword Tools used for Pay for Click Advertising can help determine what problems and issues interest your market

Google’s Keyword Tools

Take action today and use these search tips to analyze your business market.