7 SEO Strategies You Can Learn From Your Competition

Ever wonder how your competition got a #1 ranking in Google? The foundation of any successful SEO campaign should be a clear picture of what your competition is doing to achieve results.

SEO can be a task with a lot of layers, but conquering the basics can sometimes be as easy as looking at your competition. In many cases, your competitors actually will teach you something that you can use to alter your current efforts (as opposed to teaching you something new altogether), so it's important to keep an eye on others in your industry for clues.

Top 7 SEO Strategies Your Competition Can Teach You

• They can give you insights into link acquisition strategies/partners.

This is probably the biggest and most valuable piece of information your competition can give you. Consider using a tool like Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs to type in your competitions domain name. This will give you a list of all the backlinks that your competition has earned. You can then start to see patterns of what your competition is doing to be able to acquire certain links.
Since they are linking to a competitor, you know there is at least the chance that they are interested in your industry in some way. See if you can get them to link back to you by connecting with that company or blogger on social media, introducing yourself, and making your content readily available. This will help open up the doors to relationships with companies/ people that are truly interested as opposed to a blind shot in the dark.

• They can help tip you off to potential advertising opportunities and platforms.

This works in the same way that looking at link building and relationship building can help give you direction for your strategy. See where your competition is advertising and what platforms they seem to be spending the most on perfecting. You may very well find an opportunity you hadn't thought about before, so this is a good place to start if you're also trying to perfect your advertising strategy (as opposed to only SEO).

• Use tools like SEMRush to help you monitor and gain insight into keyword competition.

SEMRush will allow you to plug in a URL and then gain keyword information about that URL (so in this case, your competitors). This will help show you what keywords your competitor's are targeting, which should then help give you a place to start analyzing and revising your own strategy. How many of those keywords could you compete over? It's a quick and easy way to help you make some of the most fundamental decisions about marketing, so for me this is a "must" for all companies.

• Look at their tweets and other social signals to see what gets the most engagement.

Chances are if they are your competition, their social audiences are similar to yours or what you hope your audience may someday be. This means that you should pay close attention to which types of content are thriving on their social accounts and which content is flopping. You won't be able to have exact numbers, but take a look at the number of likes and comments each post is getting. Are infographics the most popular, but videos aren't quite what you expected? This will help give you ideas about what to publish on social media.
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