Before you build a website, research the market it has to compete in.

A business decides it needs a new website.

Usually the next questions are:

How many pages do you need?
What websites do you like?
Do you need bookings?
Do you need ecommerce?
What should the homepage look like?

Then someone writes a quote and starts designing.

There is a problem with that process.

Nobody has established what the website actually needs to compete against.

Before I decide what website a business should build, I want to understand the market it is entering.

I want to know what customers are actually searching for, which businesses currently capture that demand, why they are winning, how much authority they have, which pages bring them visibility, where they are weak, and what a new entrant would realistically need to do to compete.

That research can completely change the website we end up building.

SEO should start before the website does

SEO often gets treated as something added after a website is finished.

The site gets designed, written and launched.

Then someone is asked to “do SEO.”

At that point, some of the most important decisions have already been made:

• the sitemap
• service categories
• page hierarchy
• website copy
• URLs
• functionality
• conversion paths
• geographic targeting
• content structure

Those decisions should not be based entirely on what the owner assumes customers want.

Research should help determine them.

Before building, I want evidence about the environment the website will have to operate in.

Start with what customers actually search for

Businesses naturally describe themselves using the language they use internally.

Customers do not always search that way.

A business might think its main category is obvious, while customers search for specific services, problems, locations, experiences, prices or outcomes instead.

That means the first job is not choosing keywords for pages that have already been decided.

It is understanding the search landscape itself.

I want to know:

• what people search when they are ready to buy
• how they describe the category
• which locations appear in their searches
• what problems or experiences they care about
• what questions come before the purchase
• whether demand breaks into several distinct categories
• which searches look commercially useful
• which searches appear to be informational rather than transactional

That starts giving us a map of the market.

Only then can we decide which parts of that demand a new website should be built to capture.

Your real competitors may not be who you think they are

Business owners usually know their obvious competitors.

But their search competitors can be completely different.

Imagine a new beach club in Phuket.

The owner might identify five nearby beach clubs as competitors.

But for a search like:

best beach clubs in Phuket

the results might also be dominated by:

• travel publications
• hotel websites
• Tripadvisor
• destination guides
• restaurant directories
• resorts
• event platforms

Those websites are now competitors for discovery, even though they are not competing businesses in the traditional sense.

That distinction matters.

If a directory or travel publication owns the search result, the strategy may not simply be:

Build a better beach club website.

The opportunity could involve earning inclusion in those publications, building stronger location information, developing destination content, improving Maps visibility, or pursuing a more specific part of the search market.

The SERP tells us what kind of competition actually exists.

Reverse-engineer how the strongest businesses win

Finding the competitors is only the beginning.

The useful question is:

Why are they visible?

For the businesses that repeatedly appear in important searches, I want to examine things such as:

Search visibility

Which searches do they appear for?

Which pages rank?

Is visibility concentrated around the homepage, or do individual service, location and content pages generate meaningful discovery?

Website structure

How is the site organized?

What pages exist?

How are services grouped?

What topics receive dedicated pages rather than a paragraph on the homepage?

Local search and Maps

For a local business, organic rankings are only part of the market.

How strong is the Google Business Profile?

How many reviews does the business have?

How recently are people reviewing it?

What categories and services are represented?

How consistently does the business appear across local search?

Reviews and reputation

Reviews tell us more than whether customers are happy.

They tell us what customers value.

They also tell us what they dislike.

Repeated complaints can expose weaknesses a new entrant may be able to solve.

Repeated praise can show which parts of the experience actually influence purchase decisions.

Authority and backlinks

I want to know who is referencing the competitors and why.

Not because the goal is to count their backlinks and buy one more.

The useful question is:

What evidence of authority have these businesses accumulated?

That might include:

• industry publications
• local press
• tourism websites
• associations
• partners
• hotels
• suppliers
• customer websites
• interviews
• legitimate directories
• editorial coverage

A competitor with years of independent mentions and a new business with a new domain are not starting from the same position.

The strategy has to acknowledge that.

Positioning and offers

Sometimes the strongest opportunity has nothing to do with a keyword.

One competitor may lead with price.

Another may own the luxury position.

Another may dominate a specific service.

Another may have become known for events, DJs, sunset dining, families, private groups or a specific customer segment.

Research can show whether the new business has a meaningful reason to be chosen or is about to enter the market sounding exactly like everyone else.

Measure the competitive gap before choosing your targets

Suppose a new business is entering a market where the strongest competitors have:

• established domains
• hundreds or thousands of reviews
• years of press coverage
• strong Maps presence
• relevant backlinks
• large amounts of useful content
• strong branded demand

The new business has:

• a new domain
• no reviews
• no mentions
• no backlinks
• no search history
• no brand demand

That does not mean it cannot compete.

It means the strategy should be realistic.

Trying to attack the broadest, most competitive search immediately may not be the best first move.

Research may uncover:

• less competitive high-intent searches
• underserved locations
• weak competitor pages
• service-specific opportunities
• unanswered customer questions
• experience-based searches
• content gaps
• reputation weaknesses
• acquisition channels competitors are neglecting

The objective is not to copy whoever currently ranks first.

It is to understand the battlefield well enough to choose where to enter it.

Let the research determine the website

This is where the process starts affecting the actual build.

Before research, someone might assume the business needs:

Home
About
Services
Gallery
Contact

After research, the required site could look completely different.

For a hospitality business, the evidence might show a need for:

• dedicated dining pages
• menus
• reservations
• event and DJ schedules
• ticketing
• transport or arrival information
• location-specific pages
• multilingual content
• WhatsApp or concierge flows
• customer capture
• CRM integration
• analytics and attribution

For another industry, the requirements will be different.

That is the point.

The website brief should come out of the research.

It should not be decided before the research starts. That is why Assess is a separate paid engagement that runs before Build, rather than a free scoping call folded into a quote.

The order the work runs in

1. 01Market
2. 02Demand
3. 03Competitors
4. 04Authority gap
5. 05Opportunities
6. 06Website requirements
7. 07Launch plan

Each step is answerable only once the one before it is. You cannot size an authority gap before you know who the competitors are, and you cannot write a website brief before you know what the gap is.

A real example: planning a new beach club website in North Phuket

I recently structured a discovery engagement for a new beach club being developed in North Phuket.

I could have quoted the website immediately.

Instead, the first proposed engagement was research.

Before defining the build, the plan was to investigate:

Search demand

How people actually search for beach clubs and related experiences across Phuket, Bang Tao, Surin and the surrounding area.

Not only the obvious category, but related intent around:

• dining
• beachfront restaurants
• sunsets
• DJs
• nightlife
• pool and day clubs
• location-specific searches
• other experience categories discovered during research

Competitive landscape

Which businesses currently compete for the same customer and occasion.

Then, for the important competitors:

• where they appear
• which searches they rank for
• which pages generate visibility
• their website structure
• Maps presence
• positioning
• reviews
• backlinks and authority
• content strategy
• social or discovery channels where relevant
• events, reservations and other acquisition hooks
• obvious gaps

Search strategy

The research would then determine:

• which categories should be targeted first
• which opportunities may be too competitive initially
• where faster wins may exist
• what pages the website should contain
• how local SEO should be structured
• what reputation and authority signals need to be developed
• which supporting resources could create additional discovery

Technology requirements

Only after understanding the market would we define whether the business actually needs:

• restaurant and menu functionality
• reservations
• event programming
• ticketing
• transportation information
• multilingual support
• CRM
• customer capture
• WhatsApp flows
• marketing integrations
• automation

I deliberately did not research those answers before the engagement was approved.

The research itself is the work.

The point is that the build scope should be the result of that work rather than a guess made beforehand.

Research does not mean copying competitors

Competitor research is sometimes misunderstood as:

Find what ranks and copy it.

That is not the objective.

If every competitor has the same service pages, same positioning, same claims and same website structure, reproducing that may simply create another interchangeable business.

The better questions are:

What is working?

What appears necessary to compete?

What is missing?

What are customers unhappy with?

Where is the market underserved?

Where are competitors vulnerable?

What can this business legitimately do better?

The goal is to understand the existing market well enough to build something that belongs in it and has a reason to win.

Backlink research is also not a shopping list

The same applies to backlinks.

If a competitor has 700 backlinks, the conclusion is not:

We need 701.

One link from a respected industry publication may be more meaningful than hundreds of irrelevant directory links.

The useful part of competitor backlink research is understanding where their outside validation comes from.

Who talks about them?

Why?

Which relationships, resources, stories, research, partnerships or business activities created those mentions?

That gives you an authority-building strategy, not simply a backlink target.

Build the launch plan before the build starts

Research should eventually produce a prioritized plan.

Not just:

Here are 300 keywords.

A useful plan should answer:

Before launch

What needs to exist before the website becomes public?

At launch

Which pages, profiles, tracking, conversion paths and discovery surfaces need to work from day one?

After launch

What authority, content, search, reputation and acquisition work needs to compound over time?

That is how the website becomes part of a growth system rather than a finished object sitting online.

What should happen before you quote the website?

At minimum, I want to understand:

1. The market — what customers are actually looking for.
2. The competition — who currently captures that demand.
3. The mechanism — why those competitors are winning.
4. The authority gap — how far the new business has to travel.
5. The opportunities — where a realistic entry point exists.
6. The digital requirements — what the website and surrounding systems actually need to do.
7. The launch plan — how visibility and demand begin building once the site exists.

Only then does the website scope become clear.

It would be possible to quote the website immediately.

It would also mean guessing.

At Aroc, I would rather research the business, customer, market and competitive landscape first — then build the digital system around what the evidence says is actually needed.

That is the difference between starting with a website and starting with the problem the website is supposed to solve.

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