So to make your life a "little" easier, here's a simple, effective way to increase your website's visibility in the shortest amount of time. The process is the oldest business strategy to date: analyze the leading competitors in the market. These websites have already done most of the heavy lifting to get where they are in the SERPS (search engine results pages). Just piggy back on their success.
Step 1: First and foremost, do keyword research. Select the most appropriate keywords for your website.
Step 2: Type in each target keyword into a Google search. Select and save (in notepad) the websites, which show up in the top 5 rankings for each of your keywords.
Step 3: Repeat Step 2 for each and every keyword you are trying to rank for.
Step 4: Go to www.ahrefs.com. If you do not have access to it, go get a subscription. Its probably the best backlink tool out in the market.
Step 5: Paste in the URLs of each of your competitors (that you saved in Step 2 and 3) into the "Search Links" URL bar . All the backlinks for your competitors will show up. Export this document in excel format. Repeat this step for each competitor URL for all your keywords.
Step 6: Compile all the individual exported documents into one large file.
Step 7: Once done, sort the list by descending order by "AhrefsRank." This is a ranking metric developed by ahrefs, which determines the authority of each website.
Step 8: Go to all the high ranking websites and get those links!
It seems like a lengthy process, but its not. This entire process should take less than 30 minutes and its a one time effort.
Acquiring these competitor links will almost guarantee you top placements since that's how your competitors got there. And its always good to do some of your own link building research in addition to competitive analysis. That will be the topic for the next article, so stay tuned.
If you liked this post, you might also enjoy Competitive Analysis For Link Building by Julie Joyce
Thanks.
it will help me to analyse my seo practices and make myself more sure that i am doing seo in right way.
keep writing.
Hey Zain –
This is a handy approach for quick analysis. I use a similar process and expand on some specific metrics to pay attention to for organic competitive analysis here http://www.seonick.net/seo-competitive-analysis/
Thanks Zain – Looking forward to the next article on Competitive Analysis. An alternative tool to find out more about competitors’ web ranking, traffic activity, keywords and referrals is SimilarWeb http://www.similarweb.com – would really love to know what you think of it.
Thanks for the kind words Tacy 🙂 And I will also check out the article posted by Nick and the product recommended by Daniel.