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How I Designed My Website

Competitive Research

Duration: 4 hours / ongoing

So who is my competition?

Luckily, I'm not competing against every other designer. It's a common fallacy that competition is everyone else in the same field.

Competition in regards to site development

When I go business development seminars or entrepreneur meetings, there's usually one or two web designers attending. They are competition.

Also, most everyone I know who owns a business knows someone who designs websites. Web designers are common. Because there are so many web designers, a potential client's first instinct is to work with someone they know.

I go to meet-ups where I can network. I always ask for business cards. I always ask people who designed their web sites. More importantly, I ask why the decided to go with the company they chose.

I evaluate the sites of all business cards I collect to see if any of them are better than the work of the designers in my network. For me, getting redesign work is easier than getting contracts on first site.

Competition in regards to coding services

One of my target audiences is graphic designers transitioning to websites for their clients. These designers want to do the web design, but don't have the time to learn the coding.

I Googled "denver web design coding" and variation sof that phrase. I went through each site that appeared on the first SERP (Search Engine Result Page). None of them provide only coding services. Every company found sells and markets complete site development.

Any graphic designer I meet would be hesitant to use these companies because they would be wary that a full-service design shop would steal their clientele. Every site on the first three SERPs provided complete design services and directly competed with the graphic artists I'm trying to target.

Competition for Google search terms

I usually decide to key my home page to one phrase up front before I go back to do complete SEO work after the site launched. That key phrase influences my home page so it's better to do it up front before I start developing content.

I don't come up with my search phrase randomly or by what I think is the best term. I prefer real stats. To get these stats, I use two tools: the Overture/Yahoo keyword selector tool (alternate site) and the SEOBook keyword suggestion tool

As expected, "web design denver" came up as the most searched phrased for where I wanted to position this site.

I took that term "web design denver" and did a Google search, using Firefox and the SEO Quake Add-On. With the SEO Quake Add-On, any search on Google returns a sites Google Page Rank (PR), backlink information and a host of other competitive information.

Back links are links to your website. On Google, if you type in "link: www.ockhamdesign.com", it will return all the pages that link to www.ockhamdesign.com. Backlinks and Page Rank are decent indicators of what is needed for new sites to compete against established sites in order to appear on the first SERP.

PR 6 is hard to get and hard to compete against. However, the results showed plenty of PR 4's and I know I can compete optimization-wise against those.

If was going to create a site that's a resource, I'm going to have to prove that I can get this site somewhere on the first SERP with a competitive search term.

For Ockham Design, that was the research I needed. I needed to know if any other sites already contained my information and what my chances were of optimizing my way to the first Google search result page.

Next: Define Specific Goals