As you will know if you’ve been reading up on search engine optimisation and competing sites, your competitors can be very helpful in the world of
SEO. They can provide you with all sorts of ideas for your own website’s optimisation, can be a source of keywords and can even guide you away from mistakes to make. Of course, the best part is that your competitors don’t know they’re doing any of these things for you. Another area in which competitors can be unknowingly helpful is with
link building.
Link building is a difficult task, and one that many site owners put off. It’s difficult to get a start with building links, particularly if you’re optimising for yourself. It’s one of the areas in which having an SEO company on board can be helpful. It’s also an area in which analysing your competitors’ websites is very helpful indeed.
Most SEO experts will analyse competitor sites for basic hints as to backlinks, such as where they’re coming from and how many they have. There will be a number of sites in your competitors’ like profiles that may also be willing to link to you. When looking at your competitors, think about which sites are going to be open to your approach.
Another area in which competitors’ links are helpful is in covering broken links. If your competitors have got at all sloppy about keeping contact with their link partners, you should be able to find a couple of broken links directed at their site. If these links were organic and coming from sites that have a genuine interest in your industry, the providers may be happy to have you approach them in order to replace the broken link to your competitor, with a live one for you.
