This is a sponsored post written by SE Ranking. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
Sir Francis Bacon once said that “knowledge is power.” It’s true in every domain, especially in business. When it comes to knowing and outsmarting your competitors using their own approaches and techniques, knowledge is definitely powerful.
There are various means to gain this knowledge. In this post, you’ll discover how you can outsmart your online competitors.
Research Your Competitors Using an SEO Tool
First and foremost, you need to shortlist your competitors. You can manually conduct a comprehensive marketing research and create a competitor matrix.
It might work as a top level guidance and a base to take off. You can also do a detailed SEO research by entering a list of your and your competitors’ keywords or URLs.
A good example of a tool to go with is a competitor SEO/PPC research tool by SE Ranking.
Let’s see what kind of competitive intelligence you can derive by working with this tool.
If you want to discover your competitors’ paid ads strategy and use their knowledge, you’re in the right place.
First, check the ads of your rivals and their effectiveness. Find out the most “clickable” ads and enhance yours accordingly.
Switch to Adverts in the Competitor SEO/PPC Research module and click on the ad you’re interested in to learn from its headline and text.
SE Ranking helps you filter out a list of the main competitors that generate traffic for similar keywords and provides a 360-degree view of their website parameters.
- Alexa
- DA
- Search visibility
- Backlinks
Once you select the keywords, you can add them to your semantic core. You can review the possible ranking changes for the selected period getting the full information of organic and paid traffic, organic and paid keywords, most popular keyword ads, and rankings distribution.
Analyze Your Competitors’ Backlinks So You Can Build a Better Backlink Portfolio
Backlinks are the backbone of your and your competitors’ SEO strategy so it’s only logical to review and analyze their backlinks to improve your own backlink portfolio based on this data.
To obtain a full picture of your competitors’ roadmap and working solutions, you should take into account both the source of the links and the anchor text.
It is vital to pay close attention to the origin of the links, which provides useful information about the power of the domain and what the link is about.
SE Ranking offers a sophisticated backlinks checker tool to discover all the backlinks of your competitors’ websites. The tool allows you to get a full list with one click, analyze them and obtain a picture of their backlinks strategy as well as a bunch of valuable sources to place your own links.
Also, it might be useful to get into the backlinks analysis that provides comprehensive information about an inbound link that is yours or your competitor’s.
It’s smart to review not only their good links but the “bad” ones as well to estimate the risk they might possibly encounter from Google penalties. It will help you understand if they practice some shady SEO strategy and where you can apply more forces.
Keep an Eye on What’s Changing with Page Changes Monitoring
The majority of websites are always changing.
To increase conversions, marketers and project managers constantly change their structure, design, the number of fields in the registration form, and CTAs on the pricing pages.
- What is working for your competitors?
- What hypotheses are they testing and implementing?
- What content are they adding and modifying?
You can learn the answers to these questions by monitoring the changes using a tool like Page Changes Monitoring from SE Ranking.
Comparing the changes for different periods of time, you can track whether the hypothesis is proven, whether the competitors left the changes on the page or returned it to the original version, or are testing something new.
This tool will help test your hypotheses, develop new ideas, and use the methods which were proven to work in your niche.
Conclusion
Outsmarting your competitors is all about knowledge and experience. You can also use their weapons to turn them into your competitive advantage if you know how to extract and use it.
Stay tuned for more use cases and ideas from SE Ranking and be the King with SE RanKing.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by SE Ranking. Used with permission.
In-post Images: Images by SE Ranking. Used with permission.
