SEO Link Build­ing - Use Your Com­peti­tors To Get Ahead

What SEO tricks are they do­ing that you aren’t?

Have you ever sat scratch­ing your head and won­der­ing what your com­peti­tors are do­ing that you aren’t?

They seem to be do­ing bet­ter than you, build­ing more links and ris­ing through the search en­gine ranks to beat you out of the top spots for key­words you are try­ing to rank for.

How are they man­ag­ing it?

Do some sleuthing

There are plenty of SEO link tools out there that can be used to an­a­lyze the link pro­file of any web­site - an­a­lyze yours, your competitor’s…it’s all good.

SEO­Book has a great list­ing of Free Link Rep­u­ta­tion & Analy­sis Tools that you visit for ad­di­tional free and paid tools for link anala­y­sis. 10 com­mer­cial (paid) SEO tools with free tri­als are listed here.

RankPop’s Xray tool is also a great tool de­signed to search your site for spe­cific key­word op­por­tu­ni­ties based on your an­chor text, page op­ti­miza­tion and competition.

Be­low are 3 of the best known tools, com­pared in the infographic:

• Open Site Ex­plorer - click here
• Ma­jes­tic Site Ex­plorer - click here
• Ahrefs - click here

To see the post where this im­age first ap­peared, click here

9 Steps to suc­cess­ful com­peti­tor link analysis

Think of the process of iden­ti­fy­ing your best link build­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties as though you were weed­ing a garden.

Your goal is to even­tu­ally have rows of lovely plants and flow­ers and a pile of weeds off to the side, ready for the com­post heap.

1. Pick a com­peti­tor to analyze
   This is the easy part. You likely have more than one com­peti­tor, so pick some­one who has ob­vi­ously higher rank­ings than you do.
2. Se­lect a tool to use
   We’ve listed a cou­ple of tools al­ready and linked to an SEO­Book page with plenty of other op­tions to choose from! Make sure that you choose some­thing that can ex­port the data in a for­mat that you can use later on.
3. Check the sta­tus of the links found
   You’ll want to avoid try­ing to work with 302 or 404 or parked do­main pages. Keep the links that seem to be ac­tive and dis­card the rest.
4. Re­move all ir­rel­e­vant links
   Go­ing through your link list so far, re­move any links that are al­ready link­ing to you, and any that are not link­ing to your com­pe­ti­tion. This should­n’t be dif­fi­cult if you use one of the tools above.
5. Rank links by Page Authority
   De­cide how much Page Au­thor­ity you want the links you build to have and elim­i­nate any links from your list that are be­low this value you’ve chosen.
6. Use a spread­sheet to clean things up
   You can use Ex­cel, or an open source ver­sion, it does­n’t mat­ter. The goal is to cre­ate a list that you can sort at will and use later on.
7. Let Google work for you
   You know the Google Cache? Make it work for you by look­ing at the most re­cent cache date for each link you have left on your list at this point. Also con­sider how many times the page has been cached re­cently. The more cache en­tries and the more re­cent the lat­est en­try, the more im­por­tant Google con­sid­ers the page.
8. Get your hands dirty
   Fig­u­ra­tively speak­ing of course! This stage in the process is the point where you have to go through each link one by one and find any prob­lems links. If you do, toss them.
9. Sort & Execute
   Us­ing the spread­sheet you cre­ated ear­lier (and have hope­fully been work­ing with up un­til this point) and sort the fi­nal list ac­cord­ing to dif­fer­ent prop­er­ties you’re in­ter­ested in.
   Look at how rea­son­able the pos­si­bil­ity is that you could build a link on a par­tic­u­lar page (at­tain­abil­ity), the Page Au­thor­ity value, and the last Google cache date. Any other prop­er­ties you would like to sort your list by are just fine as long as the spread­sheet can han­dle them.

Your take­away

Make sure that you or your SEO com­pany is on top of this sort of com­peti­tor re­search and analy­sis. The in­for­ma­tion gained can be ex­tremely use­ful in help­ing you meet and per­haps even beat your com­pe­ti­tion at their own game!

Your com­peti­tors have al­ready done the work to prove that there is a link build­ing op­por­tu­nity in a given lo­ca­tion, why not take that in­for­ma­tion and use it for your own link build­ing efforts?

Videeo: Com­pet­i­tive Link Analy­sis Tips Us­ing Open Site Explorer

The process list in this post was in­spired by the work of Moz.com - hop on over to their site and leave some love if you ap­pre­ci­ate their work as much as we do!