How to Find SEO Competitor Keywords, Social Media & Backlinks

October 17th, 2008 by Ann Smarty | 12 Comments

In the past I did quite a few posts on competitive research:

Today I am going to focus on what you can learn from your competitors if you are smart enough.

First of all, a few things to take note of:

Your established competitors, who have been in play long enough, have probably come across numerous pitfalls and learned how to cope with them;
The fact that your competitor has been exploring the niche much longer than you doesn’t mean he is now doing everything right;
Promoting a site without proper competition research means to promote it blind;
By merely copying your competitor, you will never be able to surpass him;
If you focus on finding what your competitor is doing profoundly wrong, you have good chances to get ahead of him.

Keeping all that in mind, let’s see what you actually can learn from your competitors.

The Keywords

Keyword research is both difficult and tricky. The only way to effectively refine your list is to test it in practice (PPC campaign may help you with that).

Your competitor may have already tested the keywords and chosen the best ones that both generated good traffic and converted. I do not suggest relying on his keywords completely. But if you take time analyzing and comparing several of your competitors’ on-page and off-page keyword targeting, you can make your list much better.

How can you do that?

here are a few (both free and paid) tools to help you identify what your competitor is already ranking for;
don’t forget to check your competitor’s PPC keywords;
use keyword prominence tools (to analyze which terms the site is optimized for);
analyze your competitors’ website visitors behavior (“Keyword Engagement” and “Keyword Effectiveness”).

Quick tip: don’t forget to compare which terms your competitor tried to rank (i.e. which terms he is using throughout the site) and which terms he ended up ranked for. Thus, you will be able to do better than him.

The Backlinks

Those who linked to your competitor, will most probably want to link to you. Again, the key here is not to copy step by step but to do better. So:

find your youngest and already successful competitors to spot newest tactics (those that are still valid and work the best);
here are the best ways to explore your competitors in Yahoo (and beyond);
also check some backlink checkers that help to organize and categorize your competitors’ promoters.

The Social Media

Check where your competitor has found his topical community. Make sure to analyze how the social media users react to your competitor, their feedback and comments, what they like and dislike.

search for his [brand name] throughout forums and social communities;
analyze what your competitor is associated with: which terms his site is tagged with.

Comments

12 responses so far ↓

RedEvo on Oct 17, 2008 at 2:50 pm

To many, simply understanding their market is an alien concept. Following the advice here will not only provide some very useful information but will also act a wake up call to the people who thought if they built it they would come.

d
Hardwood Flooring Milwaukee on Oct 17, 2008 at 7:04 pm

Thanks for the article Ann, keep up the good work

Dustan
Hardwood Flooring Milwaukee
Jessica Antoinette Farnsworth on Oct 19, 2008 at 11:41 am

I tried competitor spying about a year or two ago. There were a bunch of tools that came out to see your competitors PPC campaigns.
After months of monitoring, I learned that everyday new people came into the game to spend way too much money on clicks and then disappear a couple of months later to be replaced by more new people spending way too much money on clicks. My PPC spending has gone down over 80% since having that epiphany.

Another great post Ann!
sem services on Nov 13, 2008 at 1:56 am

Nice post….
Optimalizace webu on Nov 13, 2008 at 5:15 am

I have read many of your previous posts but this is one of the bests. Really usefull practical advices, I’m going to try most of these steps immediately. Thanks a lot again.
SeoTest on Nov 23, 2008 at 8:51 am

I try For my SEO contest site. thanks.
sbimonline.com on Nov 30, 2008 at 9:09 pm

One additional way to check back links is Google’s back link command - type link : http://www.yourcompetitorsdomain.com. Google will then return a list of the pages linking to that domain. I find this one extremely helpful, particularly when trying to figure out what my or my client’s competitors are doing and what new opportunities are out there for backlinking in my niche.

Here’s a great article with more information on finding the right keywords
ravi on Dec 10, 2008 at 8:47 am

Google won’t show you very many backlinks at all via the ‘link’ command.

Try this search instead, quotation-marks included:

“+www.websitename.+com”
lowongan on Feb 3, 2009 at 11:53 pm

thanks for that information. that is useful.
Ben Sykes, SEO Consultant on Feb 9, 2009 at 4:47 am

Find the most lucrative keywords that a client is using is difficult. I have also used all the mentioned software and always had many different results.

My advice is the same as the above. Try and look to see what the competition is doing wrong and improve on this.
Paul Morales on Feb 23, 2009 at 1:17 pm

Awesome, thanks for the help. Great information I liked how you linked to other posts. I read those too ;)
Free directory submission on Feb 24, 2009 at 2:29 pm

It is very nice articles which provides very useful information about competitors back links.