Get More Traffic To Your Website By Spying Your Competitors

Doing something new and innovative is a must. But sometimes, to get more visitors to your site is not always about outsmarting your competitors; it's about doing what they do and do it better.

There are times that you see you competition is rising. And at the same time, the competitors are getting a whole lot more than you do. Beside doing new things to beat them, a little spying on them can give you a lot of ideas.

On the internet, everyone in the same industry are competitors aiming for the same pool of audience. There a lot of ways to win the "hearts" of search engines and social media networks, but in order to drive traffic to your website, there are more than just doing things right.

Seeing what others in the same industry have done can give you conclusions on what strategy works and what doesn't, before even trying it. This will save you quite a lot resources because you don't need to do thorough research to see what will suit you.

Despite not all great strategies and methods done by your competitors will work wonders to you like they did on them, there is no reasons to not do a little spying to benefit and jump-start your future strategy.

Binocular spy

Backlink Research

Having backlinks is one of the main factors of exposure. The more backlinks you have, the higher the chance that search engines will see you better. By using tools available online, you can analyze your competitor's backlinks in order to understand their strategies and their audience.

Using the tools, you can have several insights about how your competitors' websites are linked to others' sites. You can have a list of backlinks they have from their industry's blogs, the links they have on social media, and links they have elsewhere.

As an example: if your competitor is having more links from blogs, you can conclude that they are boosting their ranks by posting on blogs and getting influencers to influence people by saying their names. If your competitor is having more backlinks from media, you can say that they are reaching people in the media industry as their link-building strategy. They may have great PRs and have connections with journalists. If you see that your competitor is having more backlinks on social media networks, you can assume that they are great in approaching people in an attractive manner.

Beside just getting insight about their link building strategy, your competitor's backlinks can also tell you many things about their audience.

For example, if many of the links are coming from a specific demographic category, you can conclude that their business is targeting that specific market.

If you have the list of their backlinks, you can do some research about how their audience reviewed them. If they are complaining more about them, or see any mistakes they have done, you can use this to your advantage by creating SEO and keyword strategy that rank for the solution for their mistakes.

Further reading: Traffic And Backlinks: Friends With Benefits

Digging Through Keywords

Keywords aren't there to be neglected. As a website in a specific industry may target different keywords, they usually have things in common.

Using tools that are available online, such as Google's Keyword Tool, you can know which keywords are most common and competitive within your industry. With the tools, you can also come up with a new set of new keywords that your competitors haven't thought about them yet.

You can also browse directly to your competitor's website, navigate to their pages, scan their navigation links, read their "About Us" page, and so forth, in order to get a glimpse of what they do, and what keywords they're aiming.

Then you can use some websites to your advantage, such as Google's Search autocomplete, Q&A websites, forums, eHow, wikiHow, etc..

Aiming for the best keywords is the best idea. However, those keywords can be highly competitive, making you difficult to start with. You can try different phrases, synonyms or long-tail keywords.

Related: Rank Higher with the Best Keywords that Matches Your Contents

See How Social They Are

SEO is one of ways to make search engines rank your site better. But to rank well on search engines, and stay there for good, and please the audience at the same time, aren't just the task for SEO only.

Social media networks have become a huge factor for search engines to rank websites. Signals from social networks are helping search engines to get more insight about websites, and rank them better.

Social media shares by themselves can't improve your competitor's link profile. However, a link shared in a tweet, or in a post, could cause massive traffic for them, and also more backlinks coming from social media users. Well crafted social media post can increase awareness and referrals.

In your spying strategy, you can analyze and review their posts, as well as the content they shared, to see what the audience likes the most. You can also see what images they use to complement their posts, or hashtags they use. You can also spy on their followers to get to know their characteristics, demography, occupation, interests, and others.

Also remember that driving more traffic to your website also means you get to know the prime time of your competitors. Read: Blogs and Targeting Audience with Prime Times

Do What They Do, But Better

Spying requires a lot of effort and time. But the result can be pleasing if you know how to craft your strategy using the information you got from them.

Strategies range from simple to sophisticated. There is no single answer for ranking well and getting more traffic. But getting to know how your competitors do can give you a head start in creating your future strategy. And by having all the information needed to jump-start your influence, you just need to better than they do.