Want to hear something crazy? In 30 minutes, I can look at your competitor’s website along with your website and deploy a strategy for you to achieve a better search engine ranking than them on Google. No joke!
I’ve learned how to spy on competitors to better understand the strategy they are using to attain a high ranking on Google. Taking their approach into account, I’m able to organize a way to begin outranking them.
Today, I’m going to share this technique with fellow entrepreneurs. The beauty of this spying tactic is that I don’t have a secret formula to get this information. It is at the disposal of any business owner, marketer or entrepreneur to use.
It’s time to get out the binoculars along with the night vision camera and let the spying games begin!
Step 1: Open Site Explorer
Moz builds tools that make SEO, inbound marketing, link building and content marketing easy. One of these amazing tools is called Open Site Explorer, which identifies top pages and researches backlinks.
To put this in layman’s terms, backlinks are the foundation of Google’s algorithm. If you have some extra time on your hands, read up on the PageRank algorithm. Basically, you want to make sure you get high quality backlinks pointing back to your site, as this will help improve your SEO rankings.
If you bring up Open Site Explorer within Moz, you can type your website — or any website for that matter — into the search bar. Once the data populates, it will bring up a metric called “domain authority.” If you are unfamiliar with domain authority, it is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines, all predicated based off of backlinks. This domain authority score will be a huge indicator to how well your site ranks on Google.
Step 2: Competitor analysis with Open Site Explorer
If you have the paid version of Moz, you can compare link metrics for up to four competitors at once. If you have the free version, just copy and paste your top competitors into Open Site Explorer and take note of their respective domain authorities.
After you jot down the domain authority of your top competitors, it is time to do a Google search. Make sure you use the Google incognito window (a setting that prevents internet history from being stored) so the search results aren’t skewed. If you are an orthodontist in Tempe, for example, make sure you are searching for keywords that will pertain to your business, such as, “orthodontist in Tempe, Arizona” or “braces in Tempe.”
What you’ll find fascinating is that if your competitor has a higher domain authority than you, there is a very, very strong probability it will rank ahead of you on Google. I say “very, very strong” because there are a lot of other factors that can go into ranking well on Google, so this is not the be all and end all. If you have a much higher domain authority than a competitor and are nowhere to be found on Google, reach out to a digital marketing agency for help in conducting a deeper dive into other areas that could be holding you back on Google.
Your domain authority, however, is the key metric that within a minute, will let you know whether or not your competitor is doing better at SEO than you.
Step 3: Backlink profile
Like I mentioned earlier, backlinks are the foundation of Google’s algorithm. This is where the domain authority score is derived from. Yet, so many businesses don’t have any sort of link building strategy in place.
There is a negative connotation with link building. Back in 2008, business owners would pay $99 and offshore their link building efforts to someone in India. Google got smart. It figured out this pattern of link profiles where these low-quality and spammy links were coming from and penalized sites who took part in this.
When I refer to link building, I’m talking more about digital public relations. You need to get high quality links pointing back to your site.
To…