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
-
If I use links intag instead of "ahref" tag can Google read links inside div tag?
Hi All, Need a suggestion on it. For buttons, I am using links in tag instead of "ahref". Do you know that can Google read links inside "div" tag? Does it pass rank juice? It will be great if you can provide any reference if possible.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pujan.bikroy0 -
Links: Links come from bizzare pages
Hi all, My question is related to links that I saw in Google Search Console. While looking at who is linking to my site, I saw that GSC has some links that are coming from third party websites but these third party webpages are not indexed and not even put up by their owners. It looks like the owner never created these pages, these pages are not indexed (when you do a site: search in Google) but the URL of these pages loads content in the browser. Example - www.samplesite1.com/fakefolder/fakeurl what exactly is this thing? To mention more details, the third party website in question is a Wordpress website and I guess is probably hijacked. But how does one even get these types pages/URLs up and running on someone else's website and then link out to other websites. I am concerned as the content that I am getting link from is adult content and I will have to do some link cleansing soon.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika10 -
How to Find Competitors Traffic Sources
Is it possible to find out where traffic is coming from on someone else website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hall.Michael0 -
Do links to a domain that re-directs to my domain pass link equity?
Hi guys. We've recently taken control of a third-party site and we're going to set up a domain re-direct so any traffic comes to our site. With any existing links that the third-party site has, will these pass link equity to our main site through the redirect? Thanks, Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinliao0 -
How to find affiliate sites linking to a competitor website?
Hello here, I am trying to understand the best way to find sites that are affiliate of a competitor, through link research. Typically our competitor's affiliates link to our competitor website via any of the following links: http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp?SID=[aff_id]&LID=[link_id] http://click.linksynergy.com/link?id=[aff+id]&offerid=[off_id]&type=2&murl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.musicnotes.com%2Fsheetmusic%2Fmtd.asp%3Fppn%3D[item_id] The first link looks much easier to find, so I have tried to find the first kind of links with Google by using the "link:" clause as follows: link:http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp Or, similarly, by using Open Site Explorer. But I always get 0 results! It is weird because I know there are thousands of affiliates out there with the same tracking code. How's that possible? Why does it look impossible to find the sites I am looking for? Would you suggest any different approach? Any ideas, suggestions and thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance. Fab.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
PR links
Its seems that at lot of or competitors are using PR site to place articles with links. They are using the same article across many sites with the same anchor text link - But they seem to be doing very well in the rankings.... I have steered away from this type of linking as I assumed Google wouldn't be keen on this type of activity but I seem to be wrong.... Any views on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
How to build links to landing pages?
I have been using link baits like infographics to get quality links to my site and I have observed that these tactics are great to get links to the home page or that particular post page where infographic was originally posted. But we have various other important landing pages and we want to transfer some link equity to those pages. Whenever we publish an infographic we post it on out blog with an embed code carrying anchor text pointed to our site’s home page. People who share our infographic, normally links to the home page or to the post page where they find that particular item. So, what are the possible ways to get links to any other landing page? Can we post some bait on other landing pages as well. I need to know some more techniques to attract deep links. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shaz_lhr1 -
Removing Canonical Links
We implemented rel=canonical as we decided to paginate our pages. We then ran some testing and on the whole pagination did not work out so we removed all on-page pagination. Now, internally when I click for example a link for Widgets I get the /widgets.php but searching through Google I get to /widgets.php?page=all . There are not redirects in place at the moment. The '?page=all' page has been rated 'A' by the SEOmoz tool under On Page Optimization reports and performs much better than the exact same page without the '?page=all' (the score dips to a 'D' grade) so need to tread carefully so we don't lose the link value. Can anyone advise us on the best way forward? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jannkuzel0