Looking to Boost Your Site’s SEO? Try a Competitive Link Analysis

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), there’s always something new to learn. It’s possible to learn more about your audience to find different tactics that may help you attract more clients. You can find more keywords to help you rank, take an in-depth look at prior campaigns, and see what improvements you can make for future efforts.

If you really want to improve your SEO game, it’s important to do all of the things mentioned above. SEO is always changing, so it’s necessary to continually find new tactics to help bring new clients to your website. While this is true, you can’t neglect an invaluable part of SEO information– your competition.

When it comes to your competitor’s linking strategy, it’s possible to use the information you gather to outrank them in several ways. You should never just copy their efforts. This isn’t going to help you get ahead. Instead, you need to find out what they have done and then use this information to improve your own strategy and efforts.

With a competitive analysis of the marketing strategies your competitors are using, you can learn a lot more about the audience you are trying to reach and what shifts in the industry that is occurring. When it comes to SEO, a competitive link analysis will help you acquire a broad, general view of your competition and help you use that information for your own strategies as you move forward.

Analyzing competitive links, just like creating a backlink profile, isn’t a one-time task. While this is true, here are a few steps that will help you get started.

Use a tool to acquire data about competitors’ links.

There are a lot of tools available online that isolate the websites with similar referring domains.

Analyze the link sources.

Once you have a list, you can determine where most links are coming from. Learning about the links the competition uses will give you insights into how to improve your strategies.

Find opportunities to use.

While you can work to build backlinks to the same sites your competition does, you can find other opportunities that may work even better for your brand identity, which will be even more beneficial.

Look at the content driving competitor links.

Look at the content provided by the links. Are they using infographics, blogs, etc.? You can discover what information the audience responds to by doing this.

Don’t forget about your audience.

Make sure you are creating content that is still valuable to your audience. With competitive analysis, you can focus your attention on what your audience likes and is looking for and what they respond to.

Information about your competition is at your fingertips. With a bit of time and effort, you can learn from what your competitors are already doing.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.