Link building remains one of the most important ranking factors, say what people may. Absolutely crucial to how search engines perceive your website. Lack of any altogether is certainly going to negatively affect where you stand on the SERP bandwagon. Lack of high-quality links, more so from spammy and shady looking websites might bring an early end to your quest to search engine greatness. High-quality backlinks, on te other hand, from some of the most popular websites with High DA and high reputation is sure to increase your chances of hitting those higher notes. But before you start building yours, it would do you a world of good if could spend a substantial amount of time evaluating your competitor’s backlink profile and narrowing down issues that need to be altogether avoided and others that need to be replicated (not exactly) for your own brand’s benefit. Keep reading to know more about how you can leverage competitor’s backlink profile analysis.
First, let’s talk about things you need to avoid.
Anchor Texts
While running through their website, if you happen to see a lot of anchor texts using the same keyword or its near-variants over and over again, take it as a warning sign. It screams trouble that will eventually land them into more. More often than not, they are SEO-driven links and not exits to relevant, related information designed to address and solve users’ search queries. The juice will soon dry out and as soon as Google gets a whiff of it, chances of a penalty, manual or algorithmic, can’t be overlooked. For you, as a brand, try creating a varied anchor text mix with exact matches, partial, brands, non-branded, naked anchor texts etc. for optimum SEO health.
Obsolete Link-building Tactics
Link farms, links from blog networks, directorial links, press releases, low-quality links from poorly written and executed guest posts. All these aspects and related strategies need to be avoided at all costs. Indulging in them is more likely to your website and reputation into trouble you may might too difficult to get out of. Red flags include content that is created without rhyme or reason purely for the sake of fitting a link or two in there somewhere with complete disregard for niche, quality, and relevance.
Things You’d Want to Replicate and Possibly Better
Content Quality
Watch out for content that was highly inflammable and went viral to earn a huge number of views, likes, shares etc. Go through that piece very patiently and try and find out why is it that it went viral as opposed to some of the other stuff. Do the same with every piece of content that ended up generating a substantially large number of backlinks, cited by a lot of popular websites including governmental and educational websites and publications. Now try and identify how you can create something similar but in your own unique way and better it according to your brand. That is your best chance of earning high-quality backlinks in the most natural way.
The Outreach Tactics
What is it that they are doing that you are unable to? How is it that they are able to tie up with some of the popular websites out there while you are still waiting for a single reply out of the 100 emails you sent to different websites? Questions like, who are they reaching out to: news organisations, educators and educational websites, or peers relevant to their niche? If you can get your hands on (quite difficult) what type of an outreach email they are writing then that will be huge boost. You can take cues from what they have written and write something even superior and reach out to similar kind of websites.
The Influencer Marketing Tactics
It is the age of influencers; you can deny or overlook all you want. If you want people to be influenced by your brand in a major way then you need influencers to market your brand on your behalf, because chances are high your competitor has already employed the same tactic and it worked wonders. Find out influencers who are relevant to your brand and pitch them an email asking if they’d like associate with your brand and promote it on their website, blog, and social media handles. To get a fair idea, you can mine the social media and see who all are talking about your competitor’s brand and chart your course thereon.
It is challenging to do that deep a level of digging for each of its competitor, but it is a far better way of playing it blind and then finding yourself fiddling for the candle in the dark complaining how did it get so dark? It is no guarantee that by doing so would fetch you higher rankings than that of your competitor, but it is definitely the right way of going about building backlinks for your website.
