Keyword research - how to find additional competitors and links
-
Hello,
We need 100 strong linking root domains to rank at all in our industry (probably more). But all our competitors are using internal pages.
I only found one competitor that is using their home page, and I found 12 good backlink possibilities through it.
How do I go about finding other competitors? I know this is a general question, but what strategies do you guys use, and could you give examples?
-
yeah i prob should have read the title......................... Can I ask what industry cause in the lawyer sector There is 100+ article/blog sites 100+ LOCAL directory sites 100+ Other Related Sites
a good place to get some backlinks is patch they use sub domains for each town so every area you market to you get a listing (and i think there blogs have follow links)
-
At the most basic level, your competitors for any given keyword are the sites that rank for that keyword - but if you Google not only your keyword, but also related keywords (not just SEO but SEO services, SEO consulting, etc.) you will start to see a few sites that come up for a variety of semantically related searches. I'd start by mining their backlinks.
There are lots of ways to find link targets beyond mining your competitors' backlinks, though. Try searching "(your keyword) blog" to find relevant blogs on your topic/in your industry. Use a service like FriendOrFollow to look at your competitors' followers and the people they follow on Twitter - some of them will have useful sites as well. Once you find a site that you'd like to target for a link, look at that site's backlinks to find more related sites to target.
Don't forget that you can use the "pages on this root domain" option in Open Site Explorer and pull out all of the links to a domain, whether to the home page or internal pages.
-
Oh I see. You misinterpreted my question
We need 100 strong backlinks for our site to rank at all in our industry (probably more). But all our competitors are using internal pages so they don't have much to sort through in OSE.
-
search "asbestos attorney" A very competitive term that I have not yet tried to target (over $100per click in adwords)
The First 3 are big sites (aka:sokolove) than it goes to domain targeted sites. Sokolove Targets some 300 or more keywords and his domain alone helps outrank most of his comp
as well a not so comp keyword "pradaxa lawyer" that we just started targeting by just creating a page without much seo gets #5 rank
I can see creating a domain for 1 keyword in an area a seoing it crazy and getting it in the top 3 but doing that 100 times seems like years of work... if you could get it to rank in a month
-
So even if there's hundreds of people building one big page authority in my industry, I could target my internal pages towards niches that are smaller or different than my competitors and do well?
That seems to be what everyone else is doing in our competitive niche. Is there a way to do this when it's pretty competitive?
-
why wouldn't you be using internal pages as well only have to build 1 page authority unless you have 100 people that can each work with an individual domain and get it authoritative
I just google search the term I want to rank for than see who comes up than through them into places like ose and see what they are doing & if I can beat them
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
H1 tags and keywords for subpages, is it best practice to reuse the keywords?
So let's say I have a parent page for shoes, and I have subpages for dress shoes, work shoes, play shoes, then inside each of those pages I have dress shoe cleaning, dress shoe repair, same for work and play shoes. Would it be ok to use h1 tags like this: Shoes > Dress Shoes > Dress Shoe Cleaning Dress Shoe Repair Work Shoes > Work Shoe Cleaning Work Shoe Repair Play Shoes > Play Shoe Cleaning Play Shoe Repair Would these be considered duplicate h1 tags since cleaning and repair are used for each subpage? In certain niche companies, it's rather difficult to use synonyms for keywords. Or is it ok to just keep things simple and use Shoes > Dress Shoes > Cleaning and so on? Especially since we have urls and breadcrumbs that are structured nicely using keywords, for this example both breadcrumbs and urls read like sitename.com/shoes/dress-shoes/cleaning. Any advice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Will buying a competitor negatively affect keyword ranking?
Hello All; After reading a lot of great info on Moz, I wanted to ask my first question. We are thinking about buying a competitor. It is a smaller ecommerce site that sells a subset of the products we already sell. The main value of the site is good ranking for a small set of keywords. For example, if we acquire this site, we would now have up to 4 listing on page 1 for some targeted keywords. We plan to operate the site separately from our own with its current name and technology. We plan to be transparent with the domain registration info, change the contact info on the new site, etc. Will the fact that both sites are owned by the same company negatively affect keyword rankings? Instead of having 4 listings for some terms will one of our sites be lowered since one company operates both sites? The site we are buying does not have a high MozRank, MozTrust or Domain Authority score. But it does have a domain that has been around for a long time. In addition to the keywords, there is value is using this new site to do marketing tests and experiment a bit. Thanks for any input. Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paulgerst0 -
Unpaid Followed Links & Canonical Links from Syndicated Content
I have a user of our syndicated content linking to our detailed source content. The content is being used across a set of related sites and driving good quality traffic. The issue is how they link and what it looks like. We have tens of thousands of new links showing up from more than a dozen domains, hundreds of sub-domains, but all coming from the same IP. The growth rate is exponential. The implementation was supposed to have canonical tags so Google could properly interpret the owner and not have duplicate syndicated content potentially outranking the source. The canonical are links are missing and the links to us are followed. While the links are not paid for, it looks bad to me. I have asked the vendor to no-follow the links and implement the agreed upon canonical tag. We have no warnings from Google, but I want to head that off and do the right thing. Is this the right approach? What would do and what would you you do while waiting on the site owner to make the fixes to reduce the possibility of penguin/google concerns? Blair
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlairKuhnen0 -
Rankings disappeared on main 2 keywords - are links the issue?
Hi, I asked a question around 6 months ago about our rankings steadily declining since April of 2013. I did originally reply to that topic a few days ago, but as it's so old I don't think it's been noticed. I'm posting again here, if that's an issue I'm happy to delete. Here it is for reference: http://moz.com/community/q/site-rankings-steadily-decreasing-do-i-need-to-remove-links Since the original post, I have done nothing linkbuilding-wise except posting blog posts and sharing them on Facebook, G+ and Twitter. There are some links in there which don't look great (ie spammy seo directories, which I'm sending removal requests to) although quite a lot of others are relevant. Here's my link profile: <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com</a> I've tried to make the site more accessible - we now have a simple, responsive design and I've tried to make the content clear and concise. In short, written for humans rather than search engines. As of the end of November, 'nuts and bolts' has now disappeared completely, and 'bolts and nuts' is page 8. There are many pages much higher which are not as relevant and have no links. We still rank highly for more specialised terms - ie 'bsw bolts' and 'imperial bolts' are still page 1, but not as high as before. We get an 'A' grade on the on-page grader for 'nuts and bolts, and most above us get F. I was cautious about removing links as our profile doesn't seem too bad but it does seem as if it's that. There are a fair few questionable directories in there, no doubt about that, but our overall practice in recent years has been natural building and link earning. So - I've created a spreadsheet and identified the bad links - ie directories with any SEO connotations. I am about to submit removal requests, I thought two polite requests a couple of weeks apart prior to disavowing with Google. But am I safe to disavow straight away? I say this as I don't think I'll get too many responses from those directories. I am also gradually beefing up the content on the shop pages in case of any 'thin content' issues after advice on the previous post. I noticed 100s of broken links in webmaster tools last week due to 2 broken links on our blog that repeated on every page and have fixed those. I have also been fixing errors W3C compliance-wise. Am I right to do all this? Can anyone offer any suggestions? I'm still not 100% sure if this is Panda, Penguin or something else. My guess is Penguin, but the decline started in March 2013, which correlates with Panda. Best Regards and thanks for any help, Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stephenshone0 -
Are Navigation links different to static links
We are trying to reduce the number of links on our homepage. We could remove some fly out navigation links, We rank 1st on Google for some of these links. Would removing these hurt our SEO. The links are accessible 1 level down if we remove the homepage.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Archers0 -
Keyword research Methods
I am Looking for keyword research guide .because there are many ask about keyword research no idea where i can start .plz expert advice highly appreciate.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity0 -
Can I rank for 3 keyword phrases using one long tial Keyword Phrase?
I am new to seo and still getting my head around long tail searches. If i use a phrase such as "luxury towels uk", Can i also rank on the same page for "luxury towels" and "towels uk"? Tui means ranking for 3 phrases using 1 long tail
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
I currently have a client that has multiple domains for multiple brands that share the same IP Address. Will link juice be passed along to the different sites when they link to one another or will it simply be considered internal linking?
I have 7 brands that are owned by the same company, each with their own domain. The brands work together to form products that are then sold to the consumer although there is not a e-commerce aspect to any of the sites. I am looking to create a modified link wheel between the sites, but didn't know if my efforts would pay off due to the same IP Address for all the sites. Any insight on this would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HughesDigital0
