SEO Competitor Analsys

Competitor research from a link building perspective is one of the most important steps to take when implementing a link building campaign. By understanding what kind of links your competitors are building, you gain insight into links that you can go after, as well as what it will take to outrank your competition. So, where do you start? As a company that provides SEO services, we always recommend beginning by performing keyword research to outline the keywords that you want to go after. Then, put your top keywords into a search engine, such as Google. Below you will find the search results for the keyword “toronto plastic surgery.” Once you have a list of the top five competitors that are ranking well for your keywords, sign in to majestic.com and click on the bucket icon as you can see below.

Once you have a list of the top five competitors that are ranking well for your keywords, sign in to majestic.com and click on the bucket icon as you can see below.

Next, go to your search results page and copy and paste the root URL. You want to take off https://www and add the URL list of your competitors to the bucket page. Then, you want to add your own URL to the list, so you can get a comparison of your site versus the competition. Once you have added all of the URLs, including your own, click add items to bucket. Then, click the Select tab to select all the domains in the list and click on Clique Hunter to the right as you can see below.

Majestic will do some calculations and show you the results in a visual form as you can see below. This visual is showing the competition on the right and some of the common sites that link to them on the left.

Below the visual, you will find a table that has all the data. The quickest way to get to the info you want is to click Download Data and download the spreadsheet to your computer as you can see below.

The spreadsheet will include 16 columns about the sites that are linking and three columns per competitor. To simplify the data, we tend to delete the following columns: Position, CrawledURLs, FirstCrawled, LastSuccessfulCrawl, IP, SubNet, CountryCode, FirstLinkDate_ and LastLinkDate_.

Using the example above you should have a spreadsheet looking like this:

Next, sort the columns using Trustflow in descending order. Then, copy the URL of the site with the highest trust flow in a browser to view the website. What’s important to keep in mind is just because it’s linking to your competition doesn’t mean it’s a great link. Ask yourself these questions:
• Is the site in my niche or relevant to my business?
• Would I want a link from here?
• What other sites is the page/site linking to and are they relevant to my industry?
• Does the site add value to my site and audience?
• Does the site have a lot of ads on the page?
• Is it a page full of links?

You want to gain some perspective on if the site is worth going after.
You also want to be cautious about sites with a low Alexa score too as these sites may be viewed poorly by Google and the other search engines.

Go down row by row in your spreadsheet from Majestic and look across the page to see what sites don’t link to yours. Check each site out and highlight the rows in different colors depending on if they are good or bad opportunities.

For the sites that are worth going after, look at the content they are linking to on your competitors sites and determine if you can develop similar or better content. Then, it’s simply a matter of informing them about the content on your site and why it is valuable for them to link to it.