Clever strategies for analyzing yours and competitors’ link profile and keywords
SEO as a marketing strategy is huge. Not only does well-executed SEO generate billions and billions in revenue for businesses each year, but it is also a fundamental part of many companies’ marketing efforts. At the same time, SEO is both challenging and broad. If you’re just starting out, SEO can feel extremely overwhelming. And even if you are an expert, there are so many different things you can work with, and areas to focus on to improve your SEO.
Should you focus on link building? Should you go all in on creating content? Should you focus on the internal structure of your website?
One strategy of SEO that is extremely effective, and will yield amazing results is analyzing your competitors’ link profile and keywords. This is quite an underrated SEO strategy that far from everyone utilize, but at the same time, it is one of the most effective strategies because what you’re essentially doing is following an already proven concept that your competitors have explored, and succeeded with. This means getting a recipe that you simply cannot fail with.
The bottom line?
You need to make an analyzation of your competitors’ link profile and keywords into a central part of your SEO strategy. And this is how you do it:
How to analyze your link profile and keywords for improved SEO
Doing this is quite forward, really. You begin by exploring what sites are linking to
See which sites link to your competitors, then reach out to them
This is my favorite backlink building strategy.
Simply begin by finding out which sites link to your competitor. This is great because of several reasons. First off, by doing this, you can identify relevant sites who normally link to sites within their own (and your) industry. Secondly, if your competitor has acquired a link from this site, there is a good chance that they can link to your site as well. In particular, if you have a better site with better content.
One good way to find the sites that link to your competitors is to use Link Assistant backlink checker. This tool offers a complete list of all referring URLs as well as the ability to export them into a spreadsheet.
When you have identified a few sites that link to your competitor that you think is relevant to your own site, it is time to reach out to them. Obviously, there are a million ways you can reach out to them on, but a very effective way is to find an article of your competitor that they are linking to, then create a better, much more in-depth article than theirs. Then, you can reach out to the linking site saying something like:
”Hi,
I saw that you linked to this article:
I just wanted to let you know that we have created a twice as long, much more in-depth piece of content about the same topic that you can find here:
Thought that it would bring more value to your readers.
Kind regards”
Best of all is that inside the app, you can gather all contact emails automatically and contact link prospects straight away. Also, if you want to use different email templates, the tool offers all different types of completed templates for every type of outreach to make your emails feel personal, or create your own templates.
Do a website SEO check
This goes for both your own website but also your competitors’.
In order to understand how you can improve, you need to know how your site is performing, and how your competitors are performing.
With the help of a website seo checker, you can see your site like search engines do, and get a more thorough and detailed insight into your site’s performance.
By running an SEO audit, you will also be able to quickly reveal every issue on your site that can affect search engine indexation, rankings, and user experience: broken links and images, duplicate content, poor mobile usability, redirect chains, internal linking problems, heavy pages and scripts, W3C validation errors, thin content, and more. Also, by learning what your competitors are doing well, and no so well, you can learn from their failures and successes as well.
Keep an eye on your backlinks
Not only do you want to make sure that you acquire backlinks, but you also want to make sure that you keep them. You will lose backlinks naturally over time for various reasons, so the least you can do is work actively to make sure that you keep as many links as possible. This is of course especially important if you have done something in exchange for that link, and then all of a sudden, that link disappears.
With the Link assistant backlink checker, you can run regular link checks to make sure your acquired links don’t get taken down, switched to no-follow, or have the wrong anchors. And if you can find that they have, you can contact your partners right away.
Link prospecting and outreach
One of the most effective SEO strategies is still backlink outreach. This means actively reaching out to other sites and site owners in one way or another, asking them to link to you (for one reason or another).
First, you, of course, need to find your link prospects. To maximize your chance of success, you want to reach out to sites that are similar to yours, and within the same industry as you. When you have found both relevant and quality sites which you want to get a link from, you need to not only reach out to them but come up with a reason for them to link to you. One idea, which was the one above, is by simply begging for one, but as you can understand, far from everyone wants to simply give a link just because they get an email from someone asking for it.
This is why you have a much higher success rate if you reciprocate – in one way or another.
A quite common outreach strategy is the following:
See which articles they have published on their own sites, and then create infographics related to these topics that complement their articles and make them more in-depth, appealing, and valuable.
This is free pieces of content that you are giving away, so if they choose to use your infographic, the least they can do is give you a link.
