Does your website look like everybody else’s? If so, you could be missing out on potential clients and new business because you blend in with the crowd.

The key to promoting your business or personal website online is to be distinctive. And the first step toward standing out from everybody else is to see what other web page owners in your niche are doing. In other words, you need to do some competitive research.

Competitive Research – Capturing Your Customer’s Imagination

The best web design is unique and distinctive. The worst is derivative and bland. Where does your website fit in?

If it’s in the latter, you probably aren’t realizing your full potential. Make a point of regularly checking out what your direct competitors are doing with their websites. If they all look exactly like yours, you probably need to make a change.

While it’s important that you get your core message across clearly and quickly to your web page visitors, you can do it in a way that doesn’t look like everybody else’s website. People looking for products and services online can be prone to “website fatigue” when clicking on one page to another.

But if your website has a unique perspective, great photos or images, and — most importantly — doesn’t look like anybody else’s, you stand a better chance of getting their business.

Making the Leap

Competitive research can help you identify the merits and drawbacks of your website. It’s the only way you can tell if your website is better or worse than those of your direct competitors.

Depending on your industry, competitive research should be done quarterly, monthly, or even weekly. It doesn’t take very long but it offers huge benefits to the quality of your website, and the profitability of your online business.