On Wednesday, Site Point published an article on the familiar topic of competitive research in web marketing. There’s no shortage of such articles online, although it is sometimes difficult to tell what sort of reader they are aimed at. This is certainly true of the Site Point article, which highlights helpful techniques related to competitive research, but seems to assume that the average owner of an e-commerce site will have the know-how to fully apply these techniques.

But this cannot be taken for granted. To the article’s credit, it does point out that “conducting competitive research for content marketing takes a serious amount of time and effort.” But it should have gone on from there to point out that that time and effort can be greatly diminished – and the end result greatly improved – by putting such research into the hands of a local web marketing company.

The article also notes that with such research, “you don’t need an inside man to learn other businesses’ strategies and priorities.” But it bears mentioning that with the help of a web marketing company in Los Angeles or another highly competitive locality, you can have something very close to an inside man.

Of course, it would be a conflict of interest for your local web marketing company to be serving your direct competitors; but if that company is experienced in the web marketing industry, it will almost certainly have relevant experience to draw on from current and past clients. In other words, when a Los Angeles web marketing company does competitive research for your site, it will have a much more solid base of information to draw on in assessing which of your competitors practices, contents, keywords, etc. should be emulated and which should be avoided.