The internet business is very competitive because many companies are offering all kinds of similar products/services/ideas. Therefore, it’s not easy to dominate a particular market or niche; but it’s possible to dominate your niche and achieve success. One of the easy ways to rise above your competitors or any company in your niche is through building backlinks. The ability to build many high-quality links is your assurance of shooting your website to the top of the search engine, thereby grabbing a significant portion of the market segment. What can you do if your competitor is occupying that desired top search engine position? The simple answer is to supplant your opponent from the position. This is where using the competitor’s backlinks strategy comes in. How can you use the strategy to dismantle your competitors and take over their position? Find out in this complete guide to the competitor’s backlinks piece.
The Psychology of market competition: Gaining a competitive edge
The goal of marketing psychology is simple, which is to gain a good portion of the market segment or niche. The idea is to offer better products or services, use better marketing strategy and technology to gain more clients, or in this case, use the competitor’s backlink strategy. Competitive edge means gaining a market ground by doing whatever you can to remove your rival from the game. Therefore, in other to execute the competitor’s backlinks strategy effectively, innovative techniques like Spy tools are used to monitor your competitor’s backlinks.
Reason for monitoring competitor’s backlinks:
A very obvious reason is to
* Know which websites your competitors are linking to.
* The second reason is to copy their link building style.
* The third reason is to copy their keywords
* The fourth reason is to remove them from the desired SERP position they are occupying as a result of utilizing a successful back linking campaign.
* The fifth reason is to generate more organic traffic.
Types of competitors:
There are two types of competitors to look out for and they are:
1. Domain level competitors:
This type of competitor fights you for SERP domination; this means that they are struggling with you to get many keywords for multiple pages. You can discover your domain competitors by:
Typing your domain into Site Explorer, you will be shown a different list of domains in your niche arranged by several regular keywords or keyword overlap.
The domain-level competitors are normally not your real opponents, and that is because they are not in the competition for the business, they are there to compete for multiple similar keywords while offering a different product/service. The good aspect of watching this type of competitor is that you can replicate their ranking strategy.
2. Page-level Rivals or competitors:
These websites are not competitors, but they struggle for specific keywords/topics on a page level. You can locate this competitor by pasting a page on your site on the Keyword Explorer. After this, scroll down to the SERP summary, you will see keyword overlap between page competitors level and the domain level competitors. Take note of the page ranking above you plus the number of referring domain of individual pages.
How to see your competitor’s backlinks:
We have already established that one of the reasons a company needs a guide to competitors backlinks is to copy their successful link building strategy. However, you cannot copy their strategy if you’re unable to see what they are doing. This is where using SEO tools like SEMRush comes in.
The SEMRush SEO tool is excellent for giving information about backlinks, and it provides a very convenient avenue to access and manipulate the information. The tool will give you all the useful metrics that are required to make a good choice, like if you can include a particular website to your target records.
Things to target when evaluating backlinks:
After you have discovered how to locate your competitor’s backlinks, what next? Not all links are good for your business; therefore, you need to know how to identify the best to avoid wasting your resources.
Target link strength:
This is a metric that estimates the strength of the backlink from a particular web page, based on its authority. In other word, if the linking site is authoritative, so will yours. So, when you are checking your competitor’s website for the link, set the filter to display only do-follow links; avoid no-follow links because they aren’t useful for SEO.
The relevance of the backlink:
Is the link relevant? It is a waste of resources to copy irrelevant link, you can ensure the links you are monitoring is useful by taking a look at the linking page.
Link position:
Where is the link placed? The most valuable backlinks are the ones that are positioned in the body of the content; avoid footers and sidebars link as they are ineffective.
Copying competitors backlinks:
This competitor’s backlinks guide will not be complete if no information is provided about how to replicate the backlinks you have painstakingly discovered.
1. Get in touch with the owners of the website your competitor is linking to. You need to link to your site and not your competitors’ (Skyscraper strategy). Secondly, include your site post as an extra resource right beside your competitor’s link.
2. Make linking to you easy. To avoid discouragement, the website owner you are contacting to link to you shouldn’t encounter any difficulty during the process. Provide information about where the link could be positioned, create new content, and make the backlink fit naturally.
3. Follow up: If after waiting for a couple of days without receiving an answer, send another message as a follow-up. Sending one follow-up email is enough.
Here you have it, a complete guide to your competitor’s backlinks. One of the ways to have control of your niche is to monitor your competitors, identify their success strategy, replicate the strategy, and produce a better copy.
