Six Critical Secrets From Competitive Link Analysis

"You can observe a lot just by watching”.

This is one of my favourite quotes from the great baseball coach, Yogi Berra.

Like most memorable quotes, it’s incredibly simple, and the wit in the statement makes us stop and think.

So what can we learn about our competitors' linking strategies just by watching? A lot as it turns out - we’ve just got to know what to watch.

The first step is to find your online competitors. Just take a few of your top keyword phrases and enter them into Google: the sites that come above you in the results are you online competitors.

Now take the top four domains and enter them into Marketleap’s no-cost Link Popularity Check. (Alternatively, use Optilink or LinkSurvey).

Now you have an indication of your competitor’s strength: it is only an indication as these are not absolute numbers. Nevertheless they can provide some very useful information.

Click on any of the underlined numbers in the Marketleap results and you will be taken to a list of links from that particular search engine. Take the first 50 or 100 as a sample.

Spend time crawling through these results. Here’s what you can learn:

1. Find potential link opportunitiesLook for sites that link to all or most of your competitors. This suggests either, a directory, a publication or an authority in your industry. These will be important sites to target.
2. Assess how difficult they will be to beatCount the number of domains that point to their site. Competitors that have a good spread of links from many relevant domains as well as some gems from major news and authority sites will be the hardest to compete against.
3. Uncover artificial linking strategiesLook for similar IP addresses. The domains linking to your competitor may be different but they may come from the same IP address (you can identify this with Optilink). If the addresses are the same then your competitor is creating domains names to boost link popularity artificially.
4. Identify business relationshipsDomains that have multiple links to a single competitor. This suggests that either they have a business relationship, or your competitor owns both domains, or your competitor is buying links.
5. Explore competitors public relations activityPay particular attention to links from news sites, ezines or news distribution services. If these appear regularly then your competitor is active in online public relations - a look at their published press releases will give you an idea of what they’re up to.
6. Think how your competitor got the linkTry to understand the reasons the links were established. Was it because of a newsletter your competitor’s publish? A research report? A reciprocal arrangement? A paid for link?

Use what you find to build up a picture of how your competitors go about their link building and what appears to be successful for them. Once you understand that, you can start to plan your counter attack.