THIS IS STEP BY STEP SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
PAGE 46 TO 48 CHAPTER 7
I Spy a Competitive Advantage
When it comes to competing on the web, information about websites ranking in the position you are attempting to reach is tremendously useful. If you want to attain a certain rank for a specific search term, it stands to reason that the best plan of action is to replicate the strategies of websites that have already reached the position you’re after. Therefore, it makes sense to better understand what a website is doing to achieve its success.
In Chapter 2, SpyFu was mentioned as a powerful tool to research search terms. This tool can also be used to research the top organic searches driving traffic to competitor websites. Better yet, a lot of this information is available for free, without even signing up for a paid account.
Simply go to SpyFu (www.spyfu.com) and type in the name of a competitor’s website you want to investigate. For example, if I wanted to review the website www.cars.com, I would get a list of this particular site’s top organic keywords and top organic competitors:
Keep in mind that I’m focusing specifically on organic keywords and competitors since that is my primary focus in increasing overall website traffic and sales. However, SpyFu will also provide details around paid marketing as well if that’s a focus I were interested in pursuing.
As you can see from this chart, this research provides a handful of search terms that account for quite a bit of search volume on the site in question, as well as a handful of organic competitors. If you signed up for a paid account (even for a month), you would have access to a substantially larger amount of searches and competitors available in the SpyFu database. However, for our purposes, this should provide a great start for reviewing the competition.
If a competitor website appears to be doing well in the search rankings, it stands to reason that the site owner put some effort into their search engine presence. If you were able to identify the specific search terms that your competitor is using, you would be able to benefit from the hard work that competitor has already done to identify target search terms that will increase search engine traffic.
If you recall in Chapter 3, I advised against using meta keywords on your website because it can give away competitive intelligence about your SEO priorities. If you simply right-click on a competitor’s site, you can view their source code:
Then just look for the meta keyword tags and you’ll see which keywords are being targeted by the specific website.
Competitive Link Building
I cannot stress enough the impact a strong link profile will have on your search engine rankings. Getting other sites to link back to you is the best way to prove to the search engines that you are producing information and content that matters to their searchers.
In that regard, there are tools at our disposal that actually identify links being received by websites ranking for the search terms we’re targeting. Can you see the opportunity this presents?
It stands to reason that if certain sites have chosen to link to websites similar to yours, these sites might also be willing to link to your site. For this purpose, we’re going to do a little research and spy on the competition, so to speak.
For competitive link building, there are quite a few great tools out there that can provide tremendous value by helping to identify link-building opportunities.
With this in mind, here are some of the biggest tools out there that can help with these types of activities:
• Moz ($99/month and offers free trial)
http://www.moz.com
Moz provides tools to help optimize local business listings, track social media performance, conduct link research, access SEO metrics and much more.
• Raven Tools ($99/month and offers free trial)
http://raventools.com
Raven Tools utilizes data from multiple sources, including Moz, to offer a powerful suite of tools to help you research and manage link-building opportunities.
• Majestic SEO ($49.99/month and offers free trial)
https://www.majesticseo.com
Majestic SEO is a powerful source of link information that can allow you to see the link profiles and incoming links being received by nearly any site.
• WebCEO ($49/month and offers free trial)
http://www.webceo.com
WebCEO offers a suite of tools for nearly every SEO activity imaginable. Some of the more useful tools include a content submission service, backlink manager, website auditor, and a rank checker.
• Buzz Stream (starts at $19/month and offers free trial)
http://www.buzzstream.com
Buzz Stream was specifically constructed with link building in mind. It is designed to automate the link-building process as much as possible, thereby minimizing the time commitment. Some of the more popular features include a research tool to help find prioritized linking opportunities, outreach assistance to help you seamlessly reach out to potential link partners, and detailed tracking and reporting so you can identify how these efforts are paying off.
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