Your competition: what they're
doing while you're reading this

Right now, while you are listening to this, somebody is searching for exactly what you offer.

They have typed something into Google. Kayaking Kerry. Boat trips Dingle. Guided walks Wicklow. A list of results has come up on their screen.

You might be on that list. So is everybody else.

And the person looking at it, at a kitchen table in Dublin or on a couch in Frankfurt or at a desk in Boston, does not know a single one of you. They do not know about your twenty years at it. They do not know about your safety record, or your local knowledge, or what you are like on the day when the weather turns and you make it the best morning of their holiday anyway.

All they have is a list of links and about thirty seconds of patience.

Your visitors are never only looking at your website.

They are looking at yours and three others at the same time.

And I want to describe how that comparison actually works, because I think a lot of operators have a slightly flattering picture of it in their heads.

They imagine somebody reading each website carefully and weighing it up.

That is not what happens.

What happens is they open four tabs. They glance at each one for a few seconds. And something either happens or it does not. A photograph loads and catches them, or it does not. The price is easy to find, or it is not. The page feels alive, or it feels like nobody has been near it in years. There are reviews visible, or there are none. There is an obvious way to book, or they would have to go looking.

Those impressions stack up very fast, mostly below the level of thinking, and what comes out the other end is a feeling rather than a decision.

That one felt right. That one did not.

They close the tabs they are not going to use, and they proceed with the one that is left.

And here is the part that is hard to sit with.

The quality of your actual experience plays no part whatsoever in that comparison.

None. Because it cannot. A visitor from Stuttgart choosing between two kayaking companies in Kerry has no way on earth of knowing which one has the better guides, the more experienced skipper, the more careful attitude to safety. None of that is visible from a website.

What is visible is which site loaded faster. Which had better photographs. Which had more reviews and more recent ones. Which made the price easy to find. And which one let them book at that moment, rather than asking them to ring an Irish landline from Germany during Irish office hours.

That is the competition now. Not who is better on the water.

Who is better online, at the precise second the decision is being made.

And I know that can feel unfair, particularly if you are the one who has spent twenty years getting good at the actual thing. But there is another way to look at it. It is the most levelable playing field you will ever be on. Because the crowd beating you online are not beating you with money. They are beating you with attention. And attention is free.

Now let me give you a way to see all of this for yourself. It takes about ten minutes and it is worth more than any report anybody could sell you.

It is the incognito test.

Open a private browsing window, so your own history and your own habits are out of the picture and you get the clean view a stranger gets. Then search for your experience. Not your business name. What a visitor would actually type. Kayaking and your county. Walking tours and your nearest town.

Open the first five results in tabs. And go through them the way a stranger would, which means quickly, and without the benefit of knowing anything about any of these businesses.

Then ask yourself one question, and answer it honestly.

If you were that stranger, which of these would you book?

If the answer is yours, that is genuinely worth knowing, and it is worth protecting.

If the answer is not yours, then that is the most useful thing you will learn about your business this year. And the good news is it is fixable, because everything that decided it is on a screen.

Now, one caution about all of this, because there is a trap at the end of it.

When people do this exercise and find somebody ahead of them, the instinct is to go away and copy. Same style of photograph. Same words. Same layout. And within a year or two, everybody in the area has a website that looks like everybody else's website, and the visitor is back to choosing at random.

So use the comparison to find the gaps, not the template. The things worth copying are the plain ones. Clear pricing. Good photographs. Reviews where people can see them. A booking process that works. Those are not anybody's style. They are just competence, and there is no shame in matching somebody on competence.

But once you are level on all that, the thing that separates you is the thing nobody else has. Your people. Your patch. The forty years of knowing which morning is the right morning to go out. The story of how the place came to be yours.

We spent a whole chapter on that earlier and this is where it earns its keep. Because when four websites are equally competent, the visitor picks the one that felt like somebody rather than something.

Be as good as them on the basics. Then be entirely yourself on everything else.

So what can you do this week? Three jobs.

The first one. Do the incognito test. Properly, not in your head. Search as a stranger, open the first five, compare honestly. Note where they are beating you and note where you are ahead. That is the best competitive intelligence available to you and it costs nothing but ten minutes and a bit of humility.

The second. In that comparison, look specifically at three things. Photography. Reviews. And how easy it is to book. Those three decide most snap judgements. If somebody nearby has clearly better photographs, or far more recent reviews, or a simpler booking process, those are your first three jobs in order.

And the third. Before you look at any websites at all, compare the Google listings in the results. Photographs, number of reviews, the rating. Because for a lot of people the comparison is over before anybody clicks through to a website, and that is the shop window you did not realise you had.

And here is what I want to leave you with.

Your first hello is not competing with a brochure rack in a tourist office anymore.

It is competing with every similar experience a person can find in ten seconds on a phone.

Make sure yours is the one that makes them stop scrolling.