Finding Quality Links in Your Competitor’s Profile

Ever since we were little,we’ve been taught that stealing is wrong. And rightfully so!Taking something that doesn’t belong to you is never a good thing and it’s often a punishable offense—even for SEO. Taking content from another website or plagiarizing blogs will certainly land you with a hefty penalty from Google: one that sends you down the ladder of search results until you’re no longer on the first, second or even tenth page of results! And while any website that’s stealing content is sure to be caught by Google, there is one way to get ahead by taking something that’s not yours—however it could hardly be called stealing, since you’re merely copying an idea with your own methods and execution. What are we talking about? Finding quality links in your competitor’s link profile, of course!

Observing their tactics

Finding quality links through your competition isn’t about stealing those links—it’s about figuring out what they did to get them in the first place. Do they have a partnership with a high profile website? Have bloggers linked to their content more than yours? Did they have a piece of press that created a mega-link to their site? Take a gander through your competitor’s link profile to see where their links are coming from, then try to draw your own connections to the same or similar sites. Being able to see what types of links, how many links and the quality of those links will put you on the right track to bolstering your own linking profile—maybe in half the time it took your competition to create theirs! Another thing to look at is how their site itself is set up. Perhaps they’ve garnered quality links because their title tags and meta-data are out of this world? It’s the little things like this that can leave you behind if you’re not on top of it.

Improve on their methods

We all like to think that we’re better than our competitors, however this isn’t always the case in every facet of business. Someone is always going to do something better than you and you’re always going to do something better than anyone else. It’s important to figure out what you do well and what you do poorly because when you start to observe your competition, you can take from them tips to improve your poor performance in some areas. Does your competition get most of its quality links from high-profile bloggers? If so, what content are they producing that garners these links and how can you get on board with this? The answer might be as simple as finding a good content writer to help you produce your own high quality, unique content. When you borrow and build on the tactics that your competition executed better than you did, you’re putting yourself on the path to a more encompassing success—one that takes into account your negatives and turns them into positives that you can build on. When you do this, you’ll turn your weaknesses into strengths and blow past your competition when it comes to link building and garnering quality links back to you.

Do more

When you do catch up to your competition, it’s important not to let this benchmark become the standard by which you measure your success. The moment that you stop innovating and building on your link profile is the moment you’ve left yourself open for the competition to pass you by again. Keep looking for those high quality links and make sure that your competition stays stagnant while you power ahead.