Market research is an important first step in any business venture. It cannot be avoided if you want to be successful. Back in the old day before the internet, market research was a long and drawn out process that took quite some time and money to perform. This article will demonstrate how to research your market for free using the internet.

Back in the Day

How it used to be Done…

Traditional market research would involve focus groups, printing out hundreds of surveys, which cost a fortune, sending them to a small group of target market, and not everybody returns them. Also, you would have only been able to research local markets physically by calling into shops and viewing their prices, etc. And the only other form of market information back in those days was the newspaper adverts and reports in the Financial Times.

And How we do it Nowadays…

Now we have the internet, we can perform all our market research for free, and in a fraction of the time it used to take. Surveys can be installed on a website with push button software even a kid could use, and we can survey hundreds of people for free.

We can view the competitions websites, get their prices and decipher their marketing angle. Now even by visiting and researching your competitors’ websites, there is still some important statistical information that can’t be derived from them. That’s where Alexa.com comes in. Read on.

How to Spy on Your Competition Using Alexa.com

The first step is to go to alexa.com and bookmark the site, or alternatively download and install their browser toolbar. I prefer to install the toolbar, because it gives statistics information when you are on the competitors’ website at the top of your browser, and you can simply click on the toolbar buttons for further info.

If you use the Alexa.com website, you’ll have to copy and paste the URL from your browser address bar, into the text box field at Alexa.com Personally, I use the website rather than the toolbar, because on the website you can also enter a product/service keyword phrase to research as well as just the URL.

So after you enter the URL into Alexa, it first brings up some basic information:

The “Traffic Rank”, which is a system, used by Google and some other search engines. The lower then number, the higher up the ranks, based on a scale of 1 to 10. Their aren’t many sites with a number one page rank, Google itself is the only I can think of. I entered in Facebook.com, and it is number 2, the second most visited site on the internet.

Sites Linking In: The number of backlinks to the website. The more links you have coming in from other high traffic websites in your niche, the higher your pagerank, and have more chance of staying in the top ten, first page of a Google search. Facebook has 1,216,699 at time of writing.

Star Rating: Out of five. The higher number of stars, the better recommended the website is from its users. Again, not many have a full five star rating.

Next, you hit the ‘Get Details’ button to view more detailed information about your target competitors. The top half of the screen gives a brief ‘about me’ blurb, as well as the Statistics Summary for the site.

Digging the Dirt

Alexa is a great Market Research tool. With a glance at the summary, we can see when the site was launched, time spent by visitors on each page and age of target market. Now not all sites will have a full profile, especially new sites, but you can still get the information you need such as site visitor number and contact details of the website you are researching. And of course, you can do all this without your competitors even knowing! Yes, lots of new website owners don’t know about Alexa! So in a way, you can’t hide in the bushes with Alexa around.

In Depth Market Research

So the bottom half of the screen is seven tabs which let you dig deeper into the stats. Here I will briefly explain each tab and what it does.

Traffic Stats

This one shows all the statistical information in graph format, over the previous three month period. Show fluctuations in traffic rank, page views, market Reach, Time spent on site and number of visitors that came from search engines. The actual figures for last three months are also shown beside the graph.

Search Analytics

This tab shows info about the search engine traffic a site receives. It gives a complete run down of all the keywords people have been typing into Google that have landed them on the website. It gives the top ten, percentages of traffic for each keyword, as well as the increase and decline of each search query.

So we can now tell what’s hot and what’s not, in terms of keywords you should use in your website Meta Tags for Search engine Optimisation. Now for the non techies here, Meta Tags are just a bunch of simple lines of code working behind the scenes of your web pages. They contain information that allows the search engines index and categorize your site.

Another useful part of this is the ‘Search Advertising Metrics Highlights’. This displays the estimated Pay per Click campaign budget, clicks received this way, average advert position and the number of Adwords keywords they are bidding on both at Google and Yahoo. This is great useful stuff if you’re just about to embark on your first Google Adwords campaign. This way you can decide how much to bid on keywords, or whether or not to proceed with the process. Google Adwords is not a good place to begin your online business. Most markets are saturated, and it can be difficult to compete with big budget companies. Many have lost their shirts with Adwords, so I say avoid it at the beginning of your business empire.

Audience

Here we can see demographic info. This includes age, gender, education level, where they use the website most, and geographical locations of site users. Gives a percentage of the site traffic from each country. Good if you have a product targeted for a certain country. Also good for seeing where the biggest market for your product or service is.

Contact Info

This one is self explanatory. Great for identifying fraudulent websites, those with no details and sometimes a website has no email address or contact form on their site. So this is useful if you want to contact the webmaster of the site for a Joint Venture offer.

Now, for small fee, you can have your contact details made anonymous. Most hosts provide this service. I don’t advise this – after all, what have you to hide? Unless you’re up to no good and committing cybercrime, always provide your contact details. Now you don’t display your phone number or email address here, just your mailing address. It shows that you’re a genuine business owner, not just a fly by night scam artist or credit card fraudster.

Website Reviews

Here you can check out reviews from users of the site. Again it uses a star rating, out of five, as well as a paragraph or so reviews listing their likes and dislikes. Now some people, including competitors will post negative reviews here to discredit the website. Now I don’t condone doing this. So tread carefully here – don’t make a decision based on one review alone. Do a Google search and read other reviews elsewhere on the net.

Related Links

The top ten related sites are displayed. Saves you time rather than having to use the search engines to find your other competitors. You can also see all the other sites owned by the same business.

Clickstream

Last but not least, this one visually displays the sites the visitors are coming from, as well as where visitors are going to after leaving the website. A great tool for locating sites to request backlinks and joint venture plans.

Another Useful Part of the Alexa Website

There’s a section on the site that displays the most searched for phrases and single keywords named “What’s Hot”. Similar to Google Hot Trends, but is updated every 5 minutes, unlike Google’s hourly updates. Now there isn’t as much stats here on Alexa, but what it does do is a search of all the websites in their ‘What’s Hot” database, so you can research other websites, see what content, email squeeze pages, etc, they’re using. This can give you an insight into markets that are worthwhile investing your time and budget in.

Action steps

Do a Google Search and pick out what you believe to be the top 3 websites of your competitors.

Go over to alexa.com and enter the first URL into the search box

Open up an Excel and create a simple spreadsheet. Create the column headings – URL, Traffic Rank, and last 30 days search engine traffic %. Go to the ‘Search Analytics’ tab in Alexa for the 30 day % and record then save your spreadsheet.

Click the ‘Related Links’ tab, select the top three websites, and repeat the process from step two above.

Now with all twelve or so site info listed in your spreadsheet, sort them by Traffic Rank, in ascending order. The lower the number, the higher up in the search engines they are. So go back to Alexa and enter the site URL again. This time go to ‘ClickStream’ tab, then visit the top ten sites listed and get backlinks from those sites.