Search Engine Optimisation is a powerful tool and can help your business generate a significant amount of revenue. However, creating an efficient SEO strategy requires careful consideration and planning. Initially, it might appear to be a baffling task. However, there are certain simple techniques that can be easily employed with positive outcomes. This blog focuses on an easy SEO trick that can enable you to procure more links to your website through an analysis of your competitor’s backlink profile.
Before we delve deep, let us consider a situation.
Your competitors might be performing better than you, thus giving your website a hard time! This is indeed discouraging. However, do you know that you can outperform your competitors by stealing their backlink strategy?
Yes, that’s true!
Begin by going to Google and typing your focus keyword. This is the most important keyword for your SEO strategy and can also be termed as your money keyword.
Check to see how you rank with this particular keyword and also watch out for the ranking of your competitors. Irrespective of the fact whether they rank better or worse than your page, think of all the traffic that they might be getting to their page. The next step will involve stealing the traffic from their page and directing it towards your site. This method has been used by experts with success. In fact, people have been successful in gaining 20% more backlinks to their website.
This strategy is pretty simple and can even be utilised by people without much experience in the SEO domain. If you have been planning to develop a backlink strategy, this is a good step, to begin with.
However, before we begin, let us understand the reasons why you should consider using this strategy. We will begin by selecting a random keyword and looking at the results on Google.
For example, let us take the keyword “scheduling app” and check the first page of Google.
It is obvious that the websites displayed on the first page of Google are the ones with an excellent link profile. In simple terms, they meet the expectations laid down by Google and have successfully been able to secure the coveted rank. All the pages have a unique link profile but they are on the first page of Google. This is exactly where spying can help you to gain backlink profiles.
If you are able to build a link profile that appears like your competitors link profiles added together, you will definitely be at an advantageous position. You will be successful in developing a link profile that meets the expectation of Google and will help you to gain visibility, increase SEO and oust your competitors.
When applied effectively, this strategy can help you to secure a high rank on the first page of Google for one or more of your keywords. However, the most interesting part of this strategy is that you are allowing your competitors to build a backlink strategy for you. The effort put in by your competitors can be easily utilised to your advantage. This strategy can be employed by everyone and is sure to yield positive results.
Read on to discover the exact tricks that can make this strategy work.
Acquire Your Competitor’s Backlinks:
First and foremost, obtain a copy of your competitor’s link profile. Most websites have as high as hundreds of backlinks. So, to simplify the process for you, begin with the backlink profile of two of your major competitors.
If you try to figure the backlink profile of even your top ten competitors, the task might prove to be a complex one for you. You will find yourself overloaded with backlinks and the entire technique might emerge to be a complicated one.
To get your competitors backlinks, you can use a backlink analysis tool. There are various options but let us focus on some of the best ones.
The first tool that can be used for this purpose is Moz’s Open Site Explorer. This tool offers the best method since it will force you to solely focus on the important links.
This is how you can proceed with the tool. Go to OSE and enter the URL from where you want to acquire the links.
This will yield a result page at the bottom of which you will find a section ‘Inbound links’. Here you will be able to find the list of backlinks.
Some tools even offer the option of exporting the list of backlinks into an organised file. However, this option is not available with OSE. For this reason, you can only focus on the backlinks that have a high domain authority (DA) and Page authority (PA). You can begin with 5 to 10 links. You can steal your competitors top performing links by just reproducing these links.
Another effective tool that can be employed for this purpose is Ahrefs. You can do so by either availing their free trial or by purchasing an account. This will give you access to the best backlink tool available. Ahrefs basically consists of a multitude of tools that can help you with your SEO.
Ahrefs possesses the largest backlink index which implies that you will get complete access to the links of your competitors. The fact that Ahrefs index is updated every 15 minutes makes it all the more an efficient tool.
Besides, the tool also has a comprehensive guide that explains how the software can be used to get competitors links. Another helpful feature that Ahrefs offers is the backlink alerts. This enables you to get a weekly update about new backlinks that your competitors might have acquired. This is extremely helpful as you are constantly updated about your competitor’s link profile and have the opportunity to steal them immediately.
Even though OSE is good for beginners, Ahrefs is the perfect tool that can efficiently be employed if you wish to gather extensive data about your competitors.
There is another tool available known as Majestic. However, OSE and Ahrefs will be enough to create a perfect strategy to that will help you to get quite a number of backlinks to your page.
Assess The Links:
The next step involves assessing the links that you have gathered. You need to exactly figure out the links that are enabling the site to perform well. Besides, you need to ensure that you are able to get superior quality backlinks in the right way. Else, you might end up with a penalty from Google and this can damage your SEO efforts.
For this purpose, you need to understand Google’s Page Rank. It is used by Google to assess the quality and authority of a website. Websites have a PR rank from 0 to 10 and 10 stands for the best PR.
The PR scores are not visible yet play a prominent role in the process of link building. In fact, the PR score is considered by some as an essential factor in analysing backlinks. The logic is that a site with a higher PR will definitely be of a higher quality. However, PR cannot be taken as the sole factor for consideration. This is because there are various other factors used by Google to evaluate a website.
In other words, PR should not be the only factor that requires consideration while evaluating backlink sources. Let us look at the steps that can be employed for link analysis.
The first step is to ensure that the website is actually being indexed by Google. This can be done with the help of a search string in Google. If you notice results on SERP, it implies that the site is being indexed and it does not have any penalties. However, if you don’t see the website it means that it has a penalty and can negatively affect your backlink plan. It could also be a dead link of an expired domain. In other words, if a website is not being indexed, it should not be considered for link profile.
The second step involves conducting a link profile audit on your competitor’s site.
It is a known fact that it is extremely necessary to ensure that your link profile is as efficient as can be. For this reason, it is important to perform link audits on a frequent basis.
Similarly, a link profile audit for your competitor’s works in a similar way. You get valuable data about your competitors that can be used to outperform them in SERPs. To apply this technique, you just need to follow the same steps for a link audit. Just that you don’t need to do the ‘check for penalties’ step. For this purpose, you can either use OSE or SEMrush’s Backlink Audit Tool. At the end of this process, you have a list of healthy backlinks from your competitor’s site. Begin by just focusing on about 5-10 of the best backlinks for a site.
The next step involves doing a cross-reference of the top backlinks with the links retrieved earlier. Consider the links that you found in the previous audit and figure out their position in the link audit result. If they look good, you can use them. Else you can remove them from your list.
Prepare A Master Spreadsheet:
The final step involves creating a master spreadsheet for your reference. This is a simple step and all you need to do is to copy the links that you are emphasising on to a spreadsheet.
You can either use Excel or Google Spreadsheet for this purpose. You can also do it manually and since there aren’t too many links, it should not be a tedious process. You can add the following two columns in your spreadsheet.
– Replicated
– Link
In the replicated column you can maintain a record whether you were able to replicate the backlink or not. In the link column, you can add the backlinks that you got after successfully replicating.
Replicating Backlink:
This process involves acquiring backlinks in the same way as that of competitors.
Let us take an example: If you find that you competitors have got a backlink from a particular discussion forum, you can follow the same technique to acquire backlinks.
If you come across a question on Quora that is from your area of expertise, you can post a useful answer and add a link to your website. This will enable you to get a powerful backlink by using your competitor’s method.
Another valuable strategy that can help you to get backlink is through guest blogging. Many blogs offer authors the opportunity to include a free backlink in the bio section. Even if you are not able to contribute a guest post on the same site as your competitor, you can use other sites. This is a valuable strategy and can help you to get powerful backlinks. You can also get backlinks from blog comments and discussion posts. You can even be a part of the conversation and add a backlink.
While using these techniques to create backlinks, you also need to consider a vital factor. Make sure to include relevant and valuable information on your site. In other words, you just cannot focus on directing people to your page. You also need to ensure that your content is able to offer concrete information that people will appreciate.
If you are looking out for a high-powered technique that can boost SEO, try this out. You will surely succeed in reaping positive results !
