As a marketer, you know that link building is an effective way to boost your website’s SEO. However, Google (and other search engines) are regularly updating and changing their algorithm. Because of this, staying abreast of the changes, utilizing white-hat SEO techniques, and utilizing the right research methods to build links is more important than ever before.
Your website can generate new links and get a bit of a PR boost with a competitive analysis. When you understand the types of links the competition is generating, developing new strategies and achieving “big wins” can become your SEO and marketing reality.
Keep reading to learn more about some of the tactics, steps, and tools you can begin to use today.
Creating a Customized Toolkit
The first step of a competitive analysis is to create a list of your top competitions. Think of everyone in your industry or vertical who appears for some of the keywords you want to rank for.
Some tools will help to make this process easier. Once you have a list of competitors, it is time to look at their backlink profile. While the tools needed for this do require you to invest, they can help to streamline the competitive analysis and provide you with some linking successes.
The Next Steps
After creating a list of sites that are linking to your competition, you should get to work. The first step is to organize the sites on your list into different categories. Some of them may be simple directories, but others could be pitched as guest blog articles, which may take a bit more convincing and effort. If you want to build third-party links, there are a few things to remember.
- Treat influencers as your equals. In some cases, authoritative sites get a lot of link-building requests. Take time to figure out what makes these influencer’s tick, and then customize your email to stand out from the others they receive.
- Let your unique voice be heard. You should not create a single email that is sent to everyone on the list you create. Remember, link building is hard, so you need to consider every word you include in your first email.
- Make sure to follow up. It’s likely that you are not going to receive an email immediately. This doesn’t mean you should give up. Follow up a few days later.
As you can see, there are several steps you can take to help build links. By investing time and effort into research and figuring out what your competition is doing, you can achieve the desired results with your website.
Remember, link building is something that website owners everywhere are trying to do. Because of this, you have to ensure you take the time to stand out from the crowd. Doing this will pay off and help ensure you get the results desired for your site, time, and the efforts you have put into the process.