Internet Home Based Business: Identifying The Competition

Once you have done the initial research to determine whether your internet home based business has any possibilities, it is necessary to get an estimate of the competition you’ll have on the net.

The following exercise is necessary to:

• Establish how easy it will be to get high ranking in the search engines.
• Minimize any advertising costs e.g. PPC advertising in Google or any other advertising program.

Here are 3  SEO search operators to use:

“Allintitle”, “allinurl” and “exact” matches.
The “allintitle” and “allinurl” operators only return pages when all the words in the search term are either in the title or in the url of the page. This gives a more accurate indication of the competition pages targeting those keywords. Pages returned with the “exact” operator might only refer to “titleist golf”, but the content might be unrelated.

I got pretty excited when I saw the potential of an internet home based business about a “golf” theme. At the time of my research the following information was returned:

The “allintitle:titleist golf” search returned 93 pages.

Note that only “pages from South Africa” was searched.
The “allinurl:titleist golf” search returned 213 pages.

And the “exact” operators with the key phrase in parenthesis returned 257 pages.

Well, seems to me that this key phrase isn’t really used in SA and there is a definite potential to get a reasonable amount or organic traffic from the search engines. If it was me, I’ll definitely consider including this key phrase in the web pages.

Repeat this process with all the keywords you want to use. The more terms identified with little competition, the stronger your chances are to built a successful internet home based business that”s going to grow into a profitable one.

A quick tip: Start a spreadsheet with all your search terms and capture the info for the searches. I suggest the following columns:
Keyword, monthly searches, allintitle, allinurl and exact. Do some maths e.g. divide results with the searches to get a ratio.
In our example for “titleist golf” the number of searches for May 2009 was 12,100. We”ll call that “searches”.

Results / Searches = Ratio. The ratio should be as low as possible.

“Allintitle” / Monthly Searches

93 / 73 = 1.27

How low do you want it to be? There are some huge potential for that exact key phrase in the South African market at the time of my research! Go get ‘em!

The above information is only a guide to assist you in starting your own internet home based business. The internet is a dynamic environment and your results might differ from the example shown.