8 Ways Spying On Your Competitor’s Backlinks Can Help Increase Your Search Engine Ranking

Are you fond of watching CSI or do you have that “detective feel” in analyzing things happening around you?

Being inquisitive will surely go a long way when applied to your business. Studying your competitors will give meaningful insights you can use for SWOT analysis to improve your business. You don’t need any special detective training to acquire such skill. You just have to know back link building basics and use them wisely.

The most common reason why people look into their competition’s backlinks is to identify potential link targets for their own site. Several bits of strategically useful information can be acquired from backlink analysis which will let you know your competitors better. As a matter of fact, insights about your competitor from studying backlinks are of equal value or even greater than merely finding link targets to improve your search rank.

Here are eight crucial points you can learn about your competitors just by studying their backlinks and how you can use such information for your own cause:

1. What are the academic institutions they link out to?

   Backlink URLs based at university career services departments often mean that the company is eyeing that particular campus as a recruitment base. Paying attention to those job pages will give you an idea on what your competitors are looking for. This will help you with your own recruiting practices to gather the most competent candidates.

2. What activities and gimmicks do they conduct?

   Sponsoring participants for certain contests (say someone from a school’s engineering department for engineering related contests) are among the strategies used by other companies to improve their visibility and their popularity. Studying backlinks will give you a picture of how these companies integrate activities for their betterment.

3. What coupon sites do they use for their promos?

   When a competitor’s site shows so many backlinks from coupon sites, it means that the said competitor is using these commercial samples as part of their online marketing strategy. Check those links and try to see if a coupon strategy will work for your own advantage.

4. Are they involved in trade shows?

   If you come across an old trade showing website that is still linking to a competitor’s site, the most probable reason behind this might be because that competitor was a sponsor of that trade show. If the trade show still exists, you can use the information you have to check whether it will be beneficial for you to follow suit and participate in the event.

5. Do they pay blogs to review their product?

   When you’re able to visit 12 different blogs all reviewing the same product or web site, possibility is that company is paying for product reviews. Weigh your options and assets if paid blog posts will strengthen your site and your business image as a whole.

6. Do they do social media spamming?

   Have you seen backlinks coming from 57 different URLs for one competitor’s site alone? Low and behold, you just have encountered a social media spammer. In the long run, spamming won’t get you anywhere. The thing is you might earn that description unintentionally. What you may consider as an innocent venture might be viewed very differently by people you were trying to reach through social media platforms. So better be careful with all your social media dealings.

7. Do they have blogrolls?

   Multiple links from the same domain often creates a blogroll. This is just normal but if one specific competitor is showing up thirty different blogs’ blogrolls and no other competitors are, more likely, this was negotiated or manipulated.

8. Are they hiring an SEO service firm aid?

   How will you know when a site has never hired an SEO firm?There are several signs. The absence of backlinks from any of the hundreds of no-name directories, no press release based backlink URLs are just few signs that would tell you a certain SEO firm is not manning a website. Nowadays, however, finding such kind of websites is a rarity.

Who would have thought that you would learn a lot of things from practices used in back link building? Competitive intelligence presents a list of options you can apply to improve your own business, based on practices proven effective by other companies, while staying away from ineffectual acts.

Want to act like a CSI agent? Start it by studying backlinks. Or better yet, hire a link builder who can help increase your search engine ranking by spying on your competitor’s backlinks!