Case Study: Using Competitive Research to Analyze a New Market

Case Study: Using Competitive Research to Analyze a New Market
There was a post by Noah Kagan on Tim Ferriss’s blog about starting a million dollar business in a weekend. It was based around Chihuahuas, and reminded me of the tactics that I use when exploring the difficulty of entering a new market from an SEO standpoint when I launch new business projects.

If you’re involved in startups or business websites of your own, you’ll like this, we’re going to talk about SEO strategy from day 1 to month 9.

What I’ll outline in this post is the method I use to research and formulate an SEO strategy for entering a new niche online. For this case study, I’ll use the example of “puppy dogs”, but really, these techniques can be used with any type of web business.

For a while, I was actually considering starting an online directory that would enable people to buy and sell puppies. The idea came about after I helped a non-technical friend list and sell dogs on the www.puppiesndogs.com site – a process that showed me there may be room for another competitor in this market.

Ultimately, after talking the idea over with my friend, I decided against pursuing this niche, as it would have required a significant amount of effort in vetting eligible owners and recipient homes to ensure that my dogs didn’t wind up in the wrong hands (aka – people who fight dogs). So – although I’m not pursuing this idea, I thought the research and strategy I planned to use to enter this market might be interesting to others who build and promote websites.

Just don’t use this information to start a similar site and sell fighting dogs… Deal? Ok – let’s get started…

Discovering Traffic Potential
Whenever I’m thinking about launching a new site, I start by examining the site I want to beat to learn a little more about the business (in this case, the puppies website listed earlier). I plug their URL into Quantcast and discover that they’re getting roughly 10,000 visitors per month. That’s a good amount of traffic and it shows me that this niche has potential. Next, I plug their URL into Open Site Explorer and take a quick look at how many links and root domains they have (and, consequently, how many I might need to beat them).