I have found that a good way to gather insight into your site’s preliminary top-level content is to take a look around at terms and language that is associated with your business/industry and find out what’s working. It is historically very difficult to gauge growth of private companies, and it still is. One technique I have found to be useful is analyzing a specific set of competitors (or competing websites) over a set sample period (let’s say 3 months) pay close attention to changes made to both their website(s) and their overall online presence (are they showing up in alerts, press releases, social bookmarking sites, blogs, social communities like: facebook, linked in, twitter?)

It is relatively straight forward to tell who has begun (if at all) to put money into their online reputation. Companies that choose to build out a web presence do so, usually, for one of two reasons:

1. They have seen a recent surge within their industry demanding online availability, or their site has begun to produce revenue.
2. Business is faltering all over the grid and in order to stay afloat they are forced to explore other selling mediums

In either case, within 3 months, one should be able to determine who has begun or continued to put money into online campaigns. This will provide some insight into what may be working, example; an information technology firm releases a whitepaper once a month, starting in January, by the end of march they are now putting out two a month – and offering additional resources for visitors who subscribe to their blog/newsletter. I think it would be safe to assume that the additional internal resources required to produce these materials are coming out of revenue realized from past success.

While this approach certainly does not always work – it is a jumping off point for many industries, especially in an economy where budgets are very tight – and unsuccessful investments will quickly be diminished.