How to Conduct Market Research for Your Business

What Market Research Is and Why You Need It

Market research helps better understand consumer behavior and market trends, make decisions about what to sell, and build business strategies. Such research helps those who start a new business or seek new ways to overtake competitors or expand their business.

Yes, starting a business without market research is possible, but it increases the risk of failure. Without a comprehensive market analysis, you may miss important information about competitors and specifics of a niche or estimate your strengths wrong.

Let’s review in what cases market research can be helpful.

• Competitive analysis. Gather all the possible info about competitors to understand whether you have enough resources to attract customers and develop your business. Assess your strengths and correct marketing strategies.
• True competitors. Pick out only relevant competitors and pay attention to their strategies. Meet strong players and be aware of newcomers to your niche.
• Ideas for business development. Analyze market competitors to search for insights and get new ideas for business development. Discover missed and new trending products or services.
• Ideas for USP. After competitor analysis, ensure you address all your customers' needs. Additionally, develop a unique selling proposition to stand out among competitors.
• Budget planning. Analyze PPC strategies. Before launching a new business, estimate the required budget to start a business and to stem the tide.
• Assess the prospects. By analyzing your resources, competitors, budget, and market in general, you can build a strategy and see the prospects to grow to.
• Find companies to invest in. Explore opportunities for incomes and encourage companies’ growth. As they thrive, your income opportunities will also increase.
• Find sponsors. Analyze a certain industry and find out the best companies to work with. Sponsors can help you expand into new markets or reach a broader audience by leveraging their existing customer base.

Market Research Tool Overview

The Market research tool provides domain ratings divided into categories and subcategories in 230 countries. Ratings are updated once a month.

The Market summary provides four metrics for the selected category:

• Traffic — the total traffic for domains in a category
• Domains — the total number of domains in a category.
  
• Referring Domains — the average number of referring domains per domain in a category.
• Backlinks — the total number of backlinks in a category.

In the rating, there are six SEO metrics for each domain to understand its place in the market:

• Traffic
• Visibility
  
• Organic keywords
• Referring domains
• Backlinks
• SDR

Let’s review a few cases of how to use and benefit from the Market research tool.

How to Find Investment And Partnership Opportunities?

Filter domains by the interested industry or niche in a specific country.

Analyze if a domain is your target opportunity for investment/partnership by metrics in the table.

Here’s what you should be looking for in metrics when seeking domains to partner with or invest in:

• Traffic — high traffic indicates a popular website, which can be valuable for partnerships or investments. Analyze the trend of traffic over time in the “Site analysis — Overview” to ensure consistency and growth.

• Visibility — a high Visibility score indicates strong SEO performance. Look for domains with consistently high visibility in search results. Trends of website’s Visibility are also displayed in “Site analysis — Overview.”
  

• Organic keywords — a higher number of organic keywords suggests a well-optimized website. Analyze the relevance of these keywords to the domain's industry in “Site analysis — Keywords.”

• Referring domains — a high number of quality referring domains can improve the domain's authority and SEO rankings. Evaluate the quality of referring domains and the diversity of backlink sources in Backlink analysis. Domains with the Domain Rank higher than 20 are considered to have a good authority.

• Backlinks — quality backlinks from authoritative websites are crucial for SEO. Analyze the number, quality, and relevance of backlinks. Look for natural, organic backlink profiles rather than artificially generated ones.

• SDR — higher SDR scores indicate stronger domain authority and visibility in search results.

How to Find the Best Keywords for Your Business?

Select a preferred country and an industry/niche in categories.

Pick out the most relevant domains for your project. Go to “Site analysis — Competitors” and enter your domain. The pop up with a list of competitors will appear. Create a custom list of competitors you’ve collected in “Market research.” You can save the template to work with it later.

The competitors are sorted by “Relevance” by default. “Relevance” is the percentage ratio of similar keywords between the competitor’s keywords and the analyzed website’s.

Start looking through “Missing keywords” of the competitors at the top. Missing keywords are keywords your competitor ranks for in the top 10 search results, but the analyzed website doesn’t even rank in the top 100 search results for them.

In this report, you have a list of keywords the competitor uses, but you don’t. You can add these keywords to your website to attract traffic you’ve been missing out on. Repeat the same with other competitors to get even more missing keywords.

After you add keywords to your website’s content, you can track the effectiveness in the Rank tracker. You'll see the current rankings, their trends, specific pages that rank for your keywords, traffic share. For this, create a project, configure settings, and add the keyword list.

In the Rank tracker, you also can find competitors for keywords in the project.

How to Evaluate a New Market Before Entering It?

You're entering the market with a new product, switching up your market focus or planning to grow in your local area. Either way, checking out the market before diving in can really help you get ready to launch your business in a new spot or field.

Select a category and country of the market you plan to enter.

The Market summary paints a clear picture of what's going on in your chosen market category. Take a peek to see if things are heating up or cooling down, so you can figure out if it's a good idea to enter the market and start your business.

Under the Market summary, there is a list of domains in the selected market category with their SEO metrics.

Find leading market players with high authority (SDR), Visibility, and Traffic. These domains dominate the market. Within this research, find out the following:

• Check Organic keywords for the whole site or separate pages to see keywords the website is targeting and the positions it ranks for.
• Analyze their Top pages to understand what content performs best.
• Check Traffic trends in the Overview report to see the dynamics of the website’s growth.
• Analyze the competitor's backlink profile in Backlink analysis to understand their link-building strategies and the quality of their inbound links. Look for opportunities to emulate successful tactics or identify potential gaps in your own backlink strategy.
  
• If relevant, analyze the domain’s paid search advertising campaigns in Site analysis. Get insights into their ad copies, keywords, ad positions, and estimated ad budgets. This information can help you refine your own PPC strategy.

Go to the last page of the domains list to see domains with the least number of organic keywords in the category. They may be new to the market or just not performing well. If their new, do similar research to understand their approach and strategies.

From both the best and the least performing domains, get ideas to optimize your business and fill strategic gaps you may discover.

Competitive Market Analysis

Get a deeper look at a domain’s SEO in other Site analysis reports. Analyze its growth dynamics and decide if the project is worth investing in, collaborating or  competing with.

To compare selected domains for more than 6 metrics, use the Domain batch analysis tool. Pick out relevant to your industry websites from the Top Websites by Industries rating and create a project with up to 20 metrics.

The highest values are highlighted in green, so you immediately see who’s overtaking the competition in each metric.

Alternatively, create a project in the Rank Tracker and add as many competitors as you need to the project. Monitor how they rank for keywords in the project and what’s their traffic share.

Competitive market research enables you to make data-driven decisions about website optimization, development, collaborations, and investments.

The benefits of conducting a competitive analysis:

• New optimization ideas (content, keywords, backlink profile changes).
• Finding a company’s weak and strong points.
• Keeping up with the market dynamics.
• Selecting a sustainable, competitive business to invest in.
• Assessing risks associated with a potential investment.
• Seeing the best potential partners.

Market and competitive analysis is a vital part of keeping your business relevant in a dynamic marketplace. Combine tools to analyze the market and get the most detailed data.

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