eye-spyDoes this describe you? You’re working hard. Having moderate success and generating some income from your home based network marketing business. You’re starting to see some results in terms of lead generation and growing your team. You’re frustrated because you know others are doing better than you

You’ve been watching your Google natural search position constantly and doing link exchanges, updating content, submitting articles for back links, blogging and a whole suite of other monthly activities that you were told were necessary. You weren’t misinformed, but you’re constantly worried that you’re targeting wrong or missing something.

The real beauty of the Internet as a forum to connect buyers with sellers is that you can see exactly what your competitors are doing at any given time. The competition that is more successful than you typically is going to be listed ahead of you for various keywords. This is a simple, rough indicator of who is getting more website traffic than you.

You don’t need to use guesswork when studying your competition, however. There are several ways online you can investigate what others are doing. Set aside a little bit of time on an ongoing basis to do some real, competitive analysis. Here’s some things you should consider doing. They don’t take long and utilize some of the same approaches you’d see if you paid thousands of dollars out to a strategic advertising and consulting agency.

First, identify your competition. Take the keywords that you are targeting for strong organic position for your website and choose 5 websites that are listed ahead of you in the results. If you’re on Page 10, choose 1 website from varying pages. Don’t just look at Page One. You need to see how things change in terms of what we’re going to show you for high ranking sites vs. underperforming sites.

Second, use your own websites as a basis for comparison. Visit Alexa.com, “the web information company.” Alexa.com’s data mining tools are extremely valuable for investigating any website you are interested in. On their homepage you will see a yellow Lookup Sites button. Enter your domain name.

The  top bar that appears shows data, with buttons below to access additional information. Only a few things are important to look at here:

A)     Traffic Rank in U.S.: This shows the website’s status in the U.S. compared to all other websites. As a value, it’s not worth much but it’s a good way to compare your website to others. The farther the gap between your rating versus others, the wider the gap in traffic.

B)      Sites Linking In: This shows how many outside websites link into a given site. If you click the number, you actually see the links coming in!

C)      Search Analytics: If you hit this button, you’ll see the Top Keywords from Search Engines hitting your website or others. Ignore the Search Terms With a High Web-Wide Ranking Driving Traffic. It’s diluted information and not completely relevant to what I’m going to show you in the next article.

If your website is new or has not been up that long, you may find that some of the data is unavailable. You can still use the information on your competitors to your advantage, however.

Now that you’ve collected data on your own website and competition, get it into an organized format. We recommend setting up a spreadsheet in Excel for reporting purposes. Set up columns for your own website and your competitors, with rows used to display the Keywords you’ve targeted, your Google position versus their position, the Traffic Rank in U.S., Sites Linking In and the keywords driving traffic as listed in Search Analytics.

In my next post, I’ll explain to you how to analyze and draw conclusions from the results, and more importantly, how to take action.

For now be sure to watch the VIDEO that accompanies this post. You’ll see me navigate Alexa.com to spy on the successes of MLM Lead System Pro leaders Cedrick Harris and David Wood.