Your brand’s SEO endeavors aim to improve the website’s search engine rankings and elevate its position on SERPs. Search engine optimization objectives include enhancing the brand’s digital visibility and enabling a more considerable portion of your target audience to access your website. But your competitors hinder this access by offering your niche similar products/services.
That’s why brands attempt to identify their rivals, understand their SEO strategies, and leverage this information to hone their optimization efforts. Three things matter the most regarding enhancing your visibility and searchability, i.e., content, keywords, and backlinks. But we’ll focus on link-building for now.
Competitor analysis
Companies conduct competitor analysis to investigate the rival brands’ search engine optimization techniques. Marketers consider these examinations to be imperative for the successful implementation of their digital marketing strategies. These investigations generalize your rivals’ SEO endeavors so that you may discover their strengths and weaknesses. That’s when you exploit these weaknesses and gain insights into how to expand your digital following. Your rivals are of three categories:
- Direct competitors: They sell products/services that are similar to yours. That’s why they’re the most dangerous of all your opponents out of there.
- Indirect competitors: Their products/services belong in the same category as yours. You can say that customers may substitute your brand for such companies.
- Phantom competitors: These brands sell products/services that are neither similar to yours nor belong in the same category. But customers may choose to spend their money on them.
Building hyperlinks
We’ll get back to the benefits of conducting competitor analysis later. First, let’s discuss the essential character backlinks play when it comes to polishing your SEO efforts. Content is the foundation of the entire search engine optimization strategy. Keywords allow your target audience to find this content and gradually migrate from random visitors to loyal consumers. But backlinks interconnect your content with the rest of the internet. They’re like “votes of confidence” you’re getting from other websites.
So, when a platform links back to your website, it’s vouching for the reliability of your content. Your brand gains digital respect and turns into a well-established authority by acquiring more high-quality hyperlinks. Moreover, your search engine ranking improves, and organic traffic to your site gets increased. If you wish to learn how to get backlinks, marketers have devised several strategies for that. It often involves creating excellent content and convincing other platforms to link back to it. Similarly:
- You can build links by writing testimonials, giving out product reviews, producing guest posts, or commenting on popular blogging platforms.
- Leverage your connections by participating in podcasts/webinars/roundups or speak with a journalist via HARO to acquire high-quality hyperlinks.
- Conduct a backlink gap analysis utilizing different tools available online. This strategy gives you a competitive edge against your rivals’ link-building endeavors.
Backlink Gap Tool
These tools enable you to discover which websites are linking back to your competitors instead of you. Since if your rivals are getting more mentions, it means they’re attracting a more significant chunk of your audience. There are multiple methods of “spying on” your competitors to acquire their links stealthily. Guess blogging has immense link-building potential. So, you can write guest articles on the same sites as your rivals are.
Similarly, it also pays to discover your rivals’ loyal audience and then convince them to link back to your website as well. Which platforms are more likely to provide you a better link-building opportunity? The answer is – as you’ve guessed – websites that link to two of your competitors.
Then there’s the notorious “skyscraper” technique which instructs you to find your rival’s most popular content and create something even better. Similarly, suppose your competitor has broken hyperlinks (links to a webpage that doesn’t exist now). In that case, you can replicate them with yours.
But all these techniques revolve around a single strategy, i.e., competitor backlink analysis. Unless you discover an excellent link-building vacancy, you can’t “steal” these hyperlinks. That’s why marketers utilize a Backlink Gap Tool to examine their competitors’ backlink portfolios. This tool helps you reach out to potential websites that can give you some decent traffic-boosting hyperlinks. Here’s how this link-building analysis gets done:
- Enter your domain and the domains of your competitors.
- Let the tool analyze your rivals’ backlink portfolios and find link-building prospects.
- Finally, you’ll get many websites you can target to get more mentions of your brand.
Benefits of backlink investigation
It’s essential to learn further information regarding these linking domains, including DA, SS, and other factors. Domain authority determines a site’s performance on SERPs with a well-established authority. Getting links from such platforms will help you outshine your rivals in search engine rankings. Similarly, the spam score reveals whether Google has penalized a site for illegal SEO tactics.
So, select platforms with a high domain authority but a low spam score to excel against your competitors. These link-finding and link-building endeavors help you establish a better digital marketing strategy than your rivals have created. Furthermore, it gives you the following advantages against rivals:
- This examination helps you understand what your competitors are doing well to earn a better position in SERPs. So, you learn valuable insights and understand how to modify your marketing efforts and improve your SEO.
- Competitor analysis allows you to discover your rivals in the industry. But conducting a backlink analysis enables you to assess these competitors’ performance in the market. So, you’ll create more (and better!) backlinks.
- Earning high-quality backlinks shall drive more traffic toward your website by elevating your brand’s reputation and enhancing your company’s visibility. That’s how your brand transforms into an authority platform among your niche.
Charms of competitor analysis
Think from a customer’s perspective. Why should he/she choose your brand over others? Your USPs or unique selling points convince an average consumer to prefer purchasing from your website. And you gain/maintain these USPs via competitor analysis. Understanding these points enables you to improve owned products/services and discover potential threats against your popularity.
Moreover, competitor analysis helps you target the right keywords that offer – besides thin search volume – lesser competition. These keywords allow you to improve your content marketing strategies as well. Marketing experts have also mentioned the following benefits of conducting a competitive analysis:
- You differentiate your brand from your competitor’s.
- You concentrate your efforts on untapped market opportunities.
- You decide which services to offer while identifying the best practices available.
Final words
It’s advisable never to underestimate your competition. Even industry giants are careful about identifying and outperforming their competitors. It’s essential always to stay one step ahead of your rivals if you wish to grow and develop among your target audience. Remember that all your SEO endeavors are futile if you haven’t performed competitor analysis.
And investigating your rivals’ backlink portfolios constitutes a crucial part of this competitor examination. Remember that there should always be a “backlink gap” between you and your opponents. Your endeavors should get directed toward turning this gap in your favor by acquiring more high-quality hyperlinks than your rivals have for improved SEO.