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Introduction

When reputation management companies first start working on your project, they look at your local competition. This will give them a clear picture of what they need to target. If you are attempting to do this on your own, you are going to need to do that as well. There are many ways that you can go about finding out who your local competition is. In this article, we are going to share with you some of these ways.

Search Engine Results Pages

Search Engine Results Pages are also known as SERPs. This is where you are going to find out a lot about your competitors. Not only will it tell you who they are, but it will also tell you where they are located. These are both very important details that you need to increase your brand awareness. If you know your competitors, where they are, and what they are doing to attract business, you can intervene before they get the business before you. In order to find out this information, all you need to do is go to your favourite search engine. Once there, you are going to type in the name or niche of your business and the location. For example, if you are a knife sharpener in Toronto, you would use the following entry, “knife sharpening Toronto.” After you click on search, you will see a display of all the companies that offer knife sharpening in Toronto. You can also narrow it down to your neighborhood if the search results are too big. In either case, this will give you an idea of who you are competing with.

Advertisements

While you are on the SERP, pay special attention to the advertisements. Many of the companies in your area will advertise on Google AdWords. These results will come up at the top of the list. These are not organic results. They are paid results. Often, these are the companies in your area. If you find one of them, note the name. They may or may not appear on the first page of Google. However, they are willing to spend money to be at the top and you need to make plans to try to do that as well.

Directories

What was once known as the Yellow Pages, has now moved to the internet in various forms. While you can still find a digital version of the Yellow Pages, there are many other directories. You need to check through all of them. Some will have listings for companies that are not on the internet but are still a threat to your business.

Conclusion

Reputation management companies know that in order to be the best, you have to know who the competition is. If you think of your business like a sports team, you will see the correlation. Every week, sports teams review tapes of their upcoming opponent. Think of the research you are doing as reviewing the tapes. This will help you to better understand your competition and therefore win the game.