One of the toughest hurdles right now is convincing small businesses that they need to step up and learn how the Internet can dramatically increase their sales and conversion. They are leaving a lot of cash on the table by delaying the process.
Nevertheless, we do pride ourselves in spying on competitors and cracking the code on achieving high rankings for target keywords (sans the flamboyant pipe and magnifying glass…). And after reading this article, we hope you takeaway at least one new takeaway that can help you get more traffic, now.
What is a Backlink Analysis?
A backlink analysis refers to the process of assessing all inbound links to your website with the goal of evaluating their effects on your ranking in search engines. Inbound links are the backlinks pointing from other websites to your site. The objective of the analysis is primarily to establish and understand the current quality of the domains and links that point towards your websites.
While marketers generally understand the importance of harnessing SEO (search engine optimization) with content marketing to reach this goal, many forget about the importance of incorporating backlinks into their overall SEO strategy
What is a Competitor Backlink Analysis?
In short, a competitor backlink analysis is basically conducting a backlink analysis, but for one of your competitors’ websites. And it’s no secret that analyzing competitor backlinks can form a quick backlink building strategy for beginners.
How to Check Competitor Backlinks
Using a a competitor backlink checker tool such as SEMRush or ahrefs can equip anyone with this information, but the competitor backlink analysis itself does require a degree of SEO industry knowledge in order to assert any backlink-building strategy with confidence.
Why is it Important to Find Competitor Backlinks?
Finding competitor backlinks and acquiring those same backlinks is a great way to get your audience to see your content, while taking away traffic (ie: money) from your competitors.
Why is obtaining a high ranking on Google important? 90% of Google’s organic traffic goes to that top spot. The rest of the search results are left to fight over that remaining measly 10% of traffic.
To put it simply, backlinking is as important as content marketing. Backlinking and content marketing are the two most important search rankings factors — but both carry equal weight. Despite this, 95% of websites have zero backlinks.
In this post, we’ll dive into the what we have learned when we analyze and find competitor backlinks for our clients.
What we Learned Spying on Competitor Backlinks
We have many SEO clients across many industries, but over time, we have learned some similarities in the discoveries we have found across each of these use cases:
- Most competitor backlinks are utter garbage, so don’t be intimidated by big numbers. When you start to break websites down, you’ll find that most of the backlinks from bigger websites are rubbish. So don’t be intimidated by big link numbers in the tools.
- Most content is terrible. The chances are you can build far better content than what’s ranking online.
- Internal links – not inbound – are still one of the best sources of links, no matter what anyone says. It’s common sense to link to your own pages. Just don’t overdo it.
- Content velocity is now what most SEO is about. Publish more content, more aggressively and do it as your life depends on it. If it’s not written it can’t rank.
- You don’t have to publish perfect content the first time if you don’t plan on promoting it. It’s perfectly OK to publish lean content and when it ranks on page 2 or 3 in time, then upgrade it.
- Google is carving up the SERPS, they don’t want people to click on your site. But remember Google isn’t the only search engine. While they only have a small % of the market DuckDuckGo handles an average of 98.79 million search queries a day and is growing fast. Expect other search engines to be launched soon, making SEO future-proof.
- Product pages can and should be sales pages. Most product pages are awful, yet we know that better pages rank higher and convert better. Invest in good product descriptions.
- Don’t forget about conversion rates and capturing email addresses! Make sure you have a high-quality lead magnet and a follow-up email funnel. Grab those emails at every opportunity.
- Don’t waste your money on dog $h!T PR link-building campaigns that generate links from nothing but foreign sites. Instead, invest in real PR. Be the expert, get featured on TV, get people talking about you. Know the difference between REAL PR and the terrible link building disguised as PR.
- Create expected content and unexpected content. If I google tips for cleaning my computer, that’s what I expect to get. But you must also create content that I don’t expect, that intrigues me. It’s this content I see after I read the expected stuff, and it’s this content that makes me click on a second page.
- Leverage AI tools by asking yourself ‘how can AI help with this?’ Even if it handles intros and conclusions, it saves a lot of time.
- Smash ideas together to create fresh SEO content topics. For example, superheroes smashed with SEO = “The Hulk’s Content Creation Template That Will Make You A Better Writer”.
Want to Spy on Competitor Backlinks?
Learning and evolving is how businesses grow
If you’re ready to check your competitors’ backlinks, contact us at Frasca Digital today and we’ll run a free competitor gap analysis so you can compare your SEO efforts to your competition!
