However, with so many different online marketing tools available, it’s sometimes hard to know where to start. This is why in this opportunity, we have compiled 25 of the best options used by marketing consultants on a daily basis.

We will divide these tools into categories, according to their core features. Let us begin by discussing what’s arguably the most important category: marketing analytics tools.

Analytics Tools

Arguably, half (or more) of good marketing efforts is about proper understanding of your audience—so, analytics—.

With that being said, having the right analytics tools in your marketing arsenal is a must, and here are the best ones available today:

1. Google Analytics

A fairly obvious choice, but a very important one nonetheless.

The best part of Google Analytics is that it is totally free. Well, there’s the ultra premium Google Analytics 360 that can cost more than $100,000 annually, but for most small to mid-sized businesses (and even most large businesses), the standard version is more than enough.

Google Analytics allows us to analyze various performance metrics on our website, especially regarding our audience. These metrics include audience demographics, keywords/search queries, actions taken by visitors, bounce rate, and so on.

2. Built-In Social Media Analytics

Too often we look in other places while what we need is already on our hands. Most major social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter, among others, offer their own built-in analytics. More often than not, they are actually the best compared to other third-party social media analytics tools for the respective platforms.

The key to social media marketing is properly understanding your audience and how you can fulfill their needs, and tracking various user metrics with these built-in tools will help you in this aspect.

3. MixPanel

MixPanel is often considered as the main competitor/alternative of Google Analytics because indeed, both of them have similar core functionalities—at least on the surface—. However, there are several major differences where we can use MixPanel for different purposes.

For instance, Google Analytics mainly works by tracking user’s behavior around page views, while with MixPanel we can track various visitor actions—or “events”. MixPanel can update real-time data regarding these actions in mere seconds.

Meaning, if your marketing revolves around tracking real-time data like conversions, first-trial registrations, and so on, MixPanel can be a better choice.

4. Sumo

Formerly known as SumoMe, Sumo is an excellent all-in-one suite of analytic tools covering many different areas. Sumo especially focuses on content-related metrics like showing where your visitors click on your site, how much of your content they actually read, and so on.

If your marketing is content-heavy, Sumo is a great analytics tool to help optimize your content, increasing your site’s traffic and conversions in the process.

Besides its analytics function, Sumo also covers useful automation features like the email list builder and easy-to-use CTA buttons. A very useful tool especially for blogs and websites with heavy focus on content.

5. Whatagraph

Whatagraph is a comprehensive marketing data platform designed to help marketers easily understand and present data from various sources. It simplifies the process of creating intuitive reports and demonstrating the ROI of marketing campaigns.

The platform enables seamless connection to a wide range of data sources. Users can transform and prepare data for intuitive visualizations, create stunning presentations with a user-friendly drag-and-drop dashboard, and automate the sharing of reports. With over 45 integrations, Whatagraph makes generating reports using your existing data sources straightforward. Notable integrations include MailChimp, Semrush, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, TikTok Ads, Google Sheets, BigQuery, Ahrefs, GA4, and more.

Pricing options include the ‘Essential’ plan, starting at $249 monthly. This plan includes up to 20 source credits, 5 users, access to pre-made templates, more than 45 integrations, and the capability to transfer data to BigQuery, among other features. For more demanding users, ‘Advanced’ and ‘Custom’ plans are available. These offer additional source credits and users, custom branding, and a consolidated dashboard feature that provides a unified view of all your clients’ KPIs.

Social Media Marketing Tools

In the world dominated by social media, obviously we can’t miss social media marketing in our marketing efforts. Thankfully, a lot of useful—if not, powerful— tools are available to assist us here, such as:

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is certainly one of the most popular social media marketing tools available, with the core feature of monitoring and scheduling all your social media profiles in one streamlined dashboard.

Besides its automation functionalities, Hootsuite also offers analytics features to track the performance of your social media campaigns. The key feature, however, is the ability to schedule hundreds of posts of at once to automate your social media presence.

2. Buffer

Often compared to Hootsuite and with good reasons, mainly because both of them are centered on post-scheduling and automation.

Admittedly, Hootsuite offers more features, integrations, and even more supported platforms. However, this also means that Buffer is a simpler tool that is easier to use.

Buffer also offers analytics features, that is also simpler and focused on the performance of your posts.

3. Tailwind

Tailwind especially focuses on Instagram and Pinterest, and you can use it to schedule posts, monitor conversations, finding interesting content, and as usual, analyze your performance, among others.

The scheduling and automation features are pretty handy, as you can create an optimal schedule while using the analytics data like engagement, reach, and traffic.

With Instagram being one of the most popular social media platform today, Tailwind is a great choice if your business is active on both Pinterest and Instagram.

4. Socialbakers

An A.I.-driven social media marketing tool that especially focuses on analyzing audience behavior. With Socialbakers, you can custom-tailor your posts with more personalizations, improving engagement and conversion in the process.

Socialbakers is also capable of managing different social media platforms in one dashboard, complete with a real-time analytics feature.

With personalizations becoming increasingly important nowadays, Socialbakers is an excellent tool that can help you understand your audience better.

SEO and Content Marketing Tools

Yes, SEO is still alive and well, if not even more important than ever with the saturated market. However, it is also true that SEO has evolved to be more complicated than ever, and this is where these tools can help you.

It is also worth noting that SEO and content marketing are inseparable from each other. So, here are some of the best SEO and content marketing tools suggested by SEO expert Mike:

1. Yoast SEO

If your site is WordPress-based, Yoast is an excellent plugin that can “crawl” your website or blog, give suggestions where you can manually optimize your site, and give automated optimizations in some aspects.

This allows Google an easier time to index your site, as well as optimizing other important technical aspects like keyword density, meta description optimization, readability, and many others.

A very useful SEO tool so you don’t have to manually assess your site every time.

2. Feedly

Content monitoring is a very important aspect of content marketing: by knowing what’s currently trending and what kinds of content are effective, we can properly develop our own content.

With that being said, Feedly is simply one of the best content monitoring tools available. It’s easy to use with its intuitive and minimalist interface, and you can easily customize your preference to get the content you need.

3. Google Alerts

Google Alerts, as the name suggests, will send an alert to your email when a certain topic or keyword showed up on the web, according to your preference.

This is very useful when you are monitoring a certain topic or keyword. You can also get alerts when someone mentioned your brand, or even your competitors. This will be useful in monitoring the current trends, engagements, and your overall brand awareness.

Again, monitoring other content pieces is often the best approach in planning your own content marketing, and Google Alerts as a totally-free tool is a must.

4. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an A.I.-powered content tool offering a pretty well-rounded set of features. However it focuses on topic suggestion by analyzing topics and/or your competition.

For instance, BuzzSumo can analyze the most shared content of your chosen topic on different social media platforms, this can give you a great insight on what kinds of content to develop. You can also check what kinds of content shared by your chosen influencers, which can really help in building relationships and getting those valuable backlinks.

BuzzSumo has been one of the most popular content marketing tools for some time, and with great reasons. Very well-rounded and very useful for content research and topic generation.

5. Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is technically a tool designed for Google Adwords—Google’s keyword-based advertising publication—, but is very useful for content marketing and SEO purposes. Why? Simply because it’s so good at what it does: researching and planning keywords.

With Google Keyword Planner, you an especially find out about the search volume of your target keywords, how the trend changes over time, and suggestions for topics and other keywords.

Again, being a totally free tool, there’s simply no reason not to use Google Keyword Planner.

6. Moz Link Explorer

Formerly known as Open Site Explorer, Link Explorer is a totally free tool from Moz to check domain and page authority, as well as backlinks profile.

Domain authority, in a nutshell, is a metric developed by Moz to predict a website’s SEO performance—namely, how high it will rank on the search engine result page (SERP). It’s not 100% accurate, so we will need to take it with a grain of salt, but it’s still useful to assess your current optimizations.

You can also use Link Explorer to analyze your competitors’ websites, which can be a vital step in your overall SEO efforts.

7. Social Mention

Similar to Google Alerts, but as the name suggests, this tool focuses on social media mentions. With Social Mention, you can keep track of the social media presence of your brand, listen to the conversations, and analyze your current performance to make your improvements.

Social Mention is also very easy to use: simply type in your search query, and you’ll get various data for the query like reach, sentiment, engagement levels, and so on.

8. SEMRush and/or Ahrefs

SEMRush and Ahrefs are similar tools—and direct competitors— to each other with similar core functionality: keyword research. Both also offer similar pricing ranges starting at $99/month. Being the “premium” keyword research tools, they offer more features compared to Google Keyword Planner, and so they are worth a shot if you are serious about keyword research.

While they offer similar core features in many ways, generally SEMRush a little better at keyword research, while Ahrefs is stronger in the backlinks research aspect.

Email Marketing and Automation Tools

Even in 2015 with all the newer marketing channels, platforms, and technologies, email marketing is still one of the most effective promotional channels out there. One of the biggest reasons is the fact that a huge majority of people simply prefer email messages to receive promotional messages from brands.

So, email marketing is still very important, and with the increasing demands for personalizations, also comes a great number of email automation tools.

Here are some of the best email marketing tools available today:

1. Omnisend

Omnisend is an email marketing and automation tool created mainly for ecommerce brands. It helps businesses run email, SMS, and push notification campaigns from one place, which makes it a good choice for stores that want to keep their marketing simple and organized. The interface is also easy to understand, so it works well both for beginners and for growing teams. Another good thing about Omnisend is that it offers useful automation features built for online stores. You can set up ready-made workflows for welcome emails, abandoned carts, order updates, and follow-up messages, which can save time and help increase sales. It also comes with signup forms, audience segmentation, and product recommendations, making it a practical option for ecommerce marketing.

2. SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a well-rounded tool dedicated for email and SMS marketing. It comes with a minimalist interface that is very easy to use, making it an ideal tool even for email marketing beginners.

Another good thing about SendinBlue is that the free version is actually useful. You can input unlimited contacts on the database, which is a huge plus, and you can send up to 9,000 emails per month. For most small businesses, this number is enough, and the premium plan is fairly affordable, starting from $25/month for 40,000 emails/month.

3. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is designed with the focus for content marketing, for bloggers, podcasters, Youtubers, and other content producers.

With that being said, ConvertKit is especially focused on user experience, ease of use, and personalization. You can create attractive forms and CTAs, as well as personalized emails for individual email subscribers.

ConvertKit is also great in its automation features that are easy to understand even for complete beginners. There’s a visual automation builder where we can build our automation campaign with just our mouse clicks.

4. Drip

Drip focuses on ecommerce CRM, so there are unique features to help convert site visitors into email subscribers, and in turn,into purchasing customers. So, Drip is especially focused on generating conversions, especially by sending automated email at the right time based on the prospect’s behavior and intent.

For example, we can analyze important behaviors like returning visitors, abandoning carts, people who took a certain actions, and so on to custom tailor the messages and plan a schedule.

Drip also offers great third-party integrations, for example, the ability to display Facebook Ads.

5. MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools available today, and for its reasons.

For instance, MailChimp is very well-rounded with various features like automation, landing pages creation, smart scheduling to send your emails at the right time. It also offers excellent integration with popular third-party platforms. For example, you can easily integrate MailChimp with your WordPress-based site and ecommerce platforms.

Another reason why MailChimp is so popular is its affordability. The free plan allows you to list 2,000 subscribers and send 12,000 emails per month, while the paid plans are offered from just $10 monthly. There are also some good Mailchimp alternatives that can be a better fit for your business.

6. Aweber

A very important aspect of email marketing is actually building that email list—the lead generation phase—. Yet, too often marketers focused on the process of email marketing than actually building a list, and this is where AWeber can help you.

You get all the essential features to grow your email list in AWeber, while there are also the usual email marketing tool features like drag-and-drop newsletter builder, automating features, and conversion focused signup forms.

Landing Page Tools

A very important aspect of digital marketing is the conversion-focused landing page. This is where you convert visitors into qualified leads and convert leads into actual, paying customers.

Thankfully, nowadays there are various tools can can help you design and optimize your landing pages, such as:

1. Unbounce

Unbounce is a pretty well-rounded landing page builder where you can build, test, and optimize custom landing pages as well as other useful features like building a website pop-up.

Very easy to use with its drag-and-drop approach, a lot of built-in templates, and great integration with various popular marketing tools like WordPress, AWeber, and MailChimp, among others.

2. GetResponse

As the name suggest, GetResponse is especially focused on conversion optimizations. With GetResponse, you can easily set-up a high-converting landing pages that is also mobile-responsive (which is very important nowadays).

GetResponse also features built-in analytics and A/B testing feature. Excellent third-party integrations with Facebook and Adwords, among other platforms, and there are also useful extra features like a webinar builder and email marketing tools.

3. HubSpot

HubSpot is a popular choice not only as a landing page builder, but as a well-rounded digital marketing tool.

For instance, you can build, modify, and optimize a website some scratch without any IT knowledge, and same goes with the landing page builder. HubSpot is easy to use and the extra features from SEO and content creation tools to A/B testing features to lead capture form builder are great for those who need an all-in-one marketing tool.

A downside for HubSpot is that it’s fairly expensive, but you can just your tier package according to your needs.

4. Leadpages

Another popular landing page builder choice where you can easily build a landing page with a drag and drop approach.

A lot of (more than 160) templates, great integration with 40+ marketing tools, and is relatively easy to use. The form builder is also very intuitive and you can use it to create high-converting forms.

Leadpages is relatively old and the interface is relatively outdated, but offers some nice features with an affordable price.

End Words

Obviously, there are still many more digital marketing tools available on the market, and even categories that haven’t been listed on this guide. However, these recommendations can give you a good starting place to understand how to invest wisely in digital marketing tools, according to your business’s needs and purposes.

The post 25 of The Best Digital Marketing Tools appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

The lives we lead are driven by data. And our mobile devices are the primary conduit through which data is gathered. They are what allow advertisers and businesses to gain insight on our interests, buying habits, and even our behavior. The fact that almost everyone who lives in the modern world has a smartphone adds to the potency of using intent data to drive sales. But, before we delve into how to best use intent data, you first have to ask:

What Is Intent Data?

Intent data is defined as the information on a user’s online behavior. This includes website visits, product reviews, a user’s attendance at webinars, downloads, and even when the user consumes online content on a given topic. This is built upon the assumption that if you’re searching for something, there’s a very high chance that you have an interest in that field and that you’re more likely to buy a product or service, whether it’s out of curiosity or if you really do have a need for it.

For example: A person who collects sneakers is bound to watch YouTube videos on the latest releases and will also most likely search eCommerce websites for a specific model that they intend to buy. This information is then used to tailor the ads that the individual is shown. He is now more likely to get ads that are shoe-related because the prospective buyer has shown an interest in these products.

There are also three types of user intent:

Informational – applies to a search that a user makes in order to learn about something or to solve a problem. Informational searches tend to favor guides, boards, and forums.

A good example of this are searches like: “what is the meaning of xxxxxx?” or “how to spend a one-day vacation in Hawaii” or even “What is intent data?”.

Commercial – these are searches that are made with the intent of making a purchase that is not immediate. This can be indicative of a prospective buyer’s interest or curiosity in a certain item but is not yet completely ready at the moment to make a purchase.

For example, when a user searches for “Best Nike Running Shoes” you already have an idea that the buyer is looking for running shoes from Nike and will most likely be interested in shoes that are either from Nike or at least if those non-Nike shoes are built for running.

Transactional – these are searches that are made with the intention of making a purchase immediately. Whether it’s because the buyer has had sufficient time to decide whether or not to buy a product or if it’s because of an emergency from which the need for a particular product arises, the core concept to consider here is that the buyer has every intention of buying a particular product.

With that thought in mind, when a prospective buyer searches for a specific product, like for example, “Nike Pegasus 36 for sale”, you can already assume that this buyer has an idea of what type of Nike running shoe he wants and is going to make a purchase when the price and conditions of the transaction match his preference.

Where Can You Get Intent Data?

Now, before you’re even able to make use of intent data to your advantage, you first need to be able to figure out where you can acquire it. There are many sources from which you can acquire user intent data and you don’t always have to pay for it either.

One source you can get intent data is your Google Search Console, which will give you an insight into what keywords users are searching for as well as the frequency that those keywords are used.

This is based on the fact that when prospective buyers consider making a purchase they almost always do some online research on the product in order for them to make an informed decision.

As you may have already be expecting, the higher the frequency that a keyword was searched is indicative of the fact that there are more people that have shown an interest in that keyword or product.

While this data may not exactly be used to target specific individuals, as far as user intent is concerned, this source and the data gathered from it are sufficient to help you direct your marketing efforts. When search inquiries for a particular product are high,  you can then adjust your campaign to focus on that particular product in your catalog, or you can even offer a better alternative provided that you have brand reputation to do so.

If you’ve used GSC in the past and you’ve gotten dissuaded by its limited records (it was only able to track the past 3 months), the latest version should at least sway your mind enough to cause you to give it another try. The latest version is now able to track the past 16 months of activity.

Another source where you can get your intent data from is through your analytic tools. Whether it’s Google Analytics or any other on-site web analytics tool, you’re going to be able to see what the visitors on your website are searching for. An internal site search is a very potent tool because there’s a big chance that the people visiting your site are already interested in your brand and they are looking for a product within your inventory.

If visitors are already interested in your brand, and you know what product they are looking for, you can focus your ads on that product type or an equivalent product that you have in your inventory. However, it’s important to note that on-site tracking is not enabled by default and you’re going to have to manually enable it for it to be useful for gathering intent data.

Another way that you can gather user intent is through surveys on your site. While analytics tools will be able to help you determine external and internal search term frequencies, surveys are going to give you an opportunity to determine the reason behind a user’s visit upon your site. You can ask questions like: “what are you looking for? Are you open to using its alternatives?” Or even simply asking “Did you find what you needed?” While it’s true that surveys will tend to have many more questions than shown above, these are the questions you need in order to determine visitor intent.

For best results, consider putting all of these methods to use and combining the data that you gather from them. While you can indeed buy user data online, it’s a waste of money, especially when you’re able to make use of free tools to infer the data from.

So, How Do You Utilize Intent Data?

The most effective way to use intent data is to personalize your website to cater to anonymous visitors. It’s been proven time and again that personalized content is more likely to cause a visitor to perform a particular action, whether that’s in purchasing a product or donating to a cause, or signing up.

Intent data can also be used to build your email list and to allow your brand to connect with potential buyers. This allows you to extend your reach and to fill your inbound traffic with people who have shown an interest in what you have to offer. As we all know, quality leads mean that there’s a higher chance of conversion.

This will also allow you to play to your strengths and to determine which products or services you need to gear your campaign towards. This will even determine what products are trending and what exactly prospective buyers want from a particular item.

This is an important detail because this is also an opportunity to differentiate your brand from that of your competitors when you’re able to introduce a product that’s not only at par with what’s trending, but may even be a much better alternative.

There are many strategies that help drive sales and using intent data is one of them. The very core of marketing lies in the profound understanding of these strategies in order for you to make full use of them. Tailor your strategies to your campaign needs and test their effectiveness. It is important to stay up-to-date on the latest trends to ensure that you’re able to use every advantage you have over your competitors.

The post What Is Intent Data And What Are The Most Effective Ways To Use It To Drive Sales appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

SEO, by nature, is a competition where you try to outrank other sites. This is why an initial competitive analysis is an essential part of any SEO implementation. When done correctly, you can get valuable insights into how your competitors are approaching their SEO strategy, which can generate various benefits such as:

• Get inspirations and ideas on how to build better content, which backlinks you should pursue and how, and which keywords that can be good opportunities, among other aspects
• Figure out your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, and so you can find out how to outdo or outsmart them
• Find your competitor’s secret tactics and strategies you can “steal”.
• Improve your own SEO strategy based on real, collected data. This way, you avoid assumptions when planning your strategy

These are just some of the benefits you can have by performing an SEO analysis, and in this guide, we will learn how.

We will divide this guide into four major sections, from identifying your key competitors to finally analyzing their backlinks profile. Let us begin with the first one: identifying and validating your competitors.

Identify and Validate Your Competitors

The first step of a successful competitive analysis is knowing whom to analyze, which is this case, your competitors. Depending on the size of your industry, you can have very few to so many competitors.

On the other hand, obviously, we don’t have the time and resources to analyze all of our competitors, and so there are two layers to this step: identify your competitors, and validate the ones that are worth analyzing. First, let us discuss the key principles in identifying your competitors.

1.Identifying Key Competitors

Generally, there are three main approaches to determining your potential, most relevant SEO competitors:

• The obvious industry competitor sites

This can range from the market leaders of your industry, your closest competitors, and so on. Here, you are using common sense and the data you’ve gathered from market research.

• Top sites in your industry

The top sites in your industry can belong to the market leaders, which we have discussed above. However, there are cases when these top sites don’t belong to major brands. You can use Alexa and Similarweb, among other tools to check these top sites.

• Keyword Competitors

This is probably the most accurate approach in relations to SEO. Here, we use keyword research tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush to check our target keywords, and the top ranking sites for these keywords are our competitors. Obviously, here you will need to figure out your target keywords beforehand, and you might want to check out this guide by Backlinko here.

These three are the main approaches in finding your key competitors. Now, how can we validate them to make sure we are using our resources and time for the most important ones? This is where the validation process comes in.

2. Validation

The main approach in validating your SEO competitors is through keyword research: you would want to target competitors that are targeting, or are currently ranking on your target keywords.

To do this, we will need a keyword research tool like SEMRush, Ahrefs, or Google Keyword Planner among other tools, and figure out two things:

• Check your current positions for your target keywords
• Check these competitors’ ranked keywords, their positions, and analyze their content pieces whether they are targeting the same audiences as yours

Based on these, you should prioritize competitors who are targeting the same target keywords as yours. Depending on your available resources, you should focus on three to five key competitors to analyze.

Analyze Your Competitors’ Target Keywords

Now that you’ve selected and validated several key competitors, we should first analyze their target keywords. The purpose of this is to figure out our opportunities: we can decide whether we can target the same keywords or find other opportunities based on this data. There are several factors to consider in this step:

• The keyword difficulty (KD) of the keywords. Even if your competitors are successful with a certain keyword, it’s probably not a good idea to pursue it if the KD is too high.
• Find keyword gaps, which is, keywords where your competitors rank for when your site does not. This can be an effective approach to find new target keywords.
• There can be opportunities in your competitors’ branded keywords. For example, if your competitor, X, is the market leader of your industry, the keyword “X alternative” or “alternative for X” can be good opportunities. Similarly, you might want to target “X vs your brand name” keyword and its alternatives.

You can use keyword research tools like SEMRush of Ahrefs to figure out your competitors’ keywords easily. With these tools, you simply need to enter your competitors’ URL into the search bar, and they will display important metrics like search volume, CPC, and keyword difficulty (KD).

Analyzing Competitors’ Sites and Content

The purpose of this step is to figure out how your competitors are approaching their on-site SEO optimization, which can be divided into two things: their technical on-site optimizations and their content optimizations.

First, let us discuss several important aspects of technical optimizations you should analyze:

• The page’s load speed. It this competitor’s site is currently ranking, especially for popular keywords, you should aim to have similar loading speed, if not faster.
• Mobile-responsiveness. Pretty self-explanatory. You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool for this.
• Use of Schema.org or other structured data markups.
• URL structure and XML sitemap
• Metadata optimizations, like how your competitors are optimizing their title tags, meta descriptions, and image/video optimizations

As you might have guessed, the purpose of analyzing these technical aspects is so that you can emulate their efforts, or find areas where you can do better than them. With that being said, let’s see what we can analyze in the content department:

• The most important thing to analyze is how they are optimizing the target keyword(s) within the content. Especially pay close attention to their titles and subheadings. Also, analyze their keyword density using various available tools.
• Examine their content types. Are they using videos, images, or podcasts to enhance the textual content?
• How optimized are their landing pages, including sales pages if it’s an e-commerce site.
• The structure of their content. How long is the blog post? How are they maintaining engagement and readability of the content?
• How many links are included in each content for both external and internal links? Analyze how they are using the anchor texts.
• How are they approaching their content according to their audience’s search intent?

To get better SEO results, you should first and foremost aim to create better content than the top-ranking sites. So, this step is especially important. Hire an SEO consultant to analyze how your competitors are approaching their content, analyze their content promotion strategy, and aim to outdo them.

Analyzing Backlinks

Backlinks are still one of the most important ranking signals in SEO. In relations to SEO competitive analysis, there are two main purposes in analyzing your competitors’ backlinks:

1. Figuring out backlinks opportunities. You can aim to get the same backlinks when targeting the same keywords.
2. Figuring out whether pursuing these same links are beneficial for your site. For example, are some backlinks going to be really hard to get yourself? In this case, you would also want to decide on the alternatives.

In most cases, however, it’s a good idea to pursue the same backlinks as your competitors. In theory, you should at least similar results when you have the exact same backlinks profile. However, there are two major factors when determining whether you should pursue the backlinks:

• Links quality. Nowadays, the quality of your links is far more important than quantity. So, you might not want to pursue backlinks that are low in quality.
• Bad links and broken links. Obviously, you should avoid these two. Broken links are simply backlinks from sites or pages that are no longer operational for one reason or another. Bad links are generally purchased links or links built through blackhat tactics.

However, remember that the higher the quality, generally the harder it will be to get the inbound link. You can build a list from these high-quality backlinks, and start building your relationships with these sites until you earn these backlinks. You might want to check out this guide by Backlinko on more about link building tactics.

When analyzing your competitors’ backlinks, here are a few key areas to focus on:

1. Finding backlinks gap

Here, your aim is to find sites which are linking to your competitors’ sites but not yours, especially on pages where you are targeting the same keywords. There are various tools available that can help you in this aspect, and this list by Neil Patel is a good place to start.

2.The number of deep backlinks

Backlinks that are linking to “deep” pages have more value for SEO than a backlink to your landing page or homepage. For example, a backlink that is pointing to a content page can be considered as “deep”.

The goal of this is to find out whether your competitors have a lot of these backlinks. If the answer is yes, you will need to do the same—if not better—to rank for the same keywords. The best way to get these deep backlinks is to develop relevant, high-quality content pieces and build backlinks for each of them.

3. Anchor text usage

In SEO best practices, anchor texts should always be relevant to the content of the linked page. However, using exact-match anchor text too heavily can get you penalized by Google.

So, analyze how your competitors are using their anchor texts, as well as the anchor texts of the backlinks linking to their sites. Check the ratio between exact-match texts and generic anchors, as well as the usage of semantically-related texts.

4. Sitewide backlinks

A sitewide link is, in a nutshell, links placed throughout the whole site, commonly in the sidebar, footer, or header. Using sitewide backlinks aggressively nowadays can induce a Google Penalty due to the Penguin update. However, it can still be effective when done properly. Check out whether your competitors are getting sitewide backlinks, and you can either aim to emulate them or find different opportunities.

5. Redirects

Using 301 redirects is one of the most common (and effective) link building tactics. This is why you should analyze whether your competitors are using redirect tactics to get their backlinks, and find similar opportunities.

There are three different redirects to look for:

• Traditional 301 redirects: where a brand redirects their existing/old site to the new site, generating a backlink in the process.

• Using link shorteners: can be considered a black hat tactic, but is still quite common

• Merger redirects: where your competitor redirects an expired, but still relevant site to their site

6. Hidden links

There might be cases where a competitor is ranking really high, but has very little to no backlinks at all. In this case, there is a high probability that your competitors are hiding their backlinks.

Quite often, these sites are hiding their backlinks because they are using grey hat tactics like using a Private Blog Network (PBN) or even black hat tactics.

End Words: Learning From Your Competitors

As we have mentioned, SEO competitive analysis should be an integral part of any SEO strategy. A proper competitive analysis can provide very valuable information about your competitors’ performances and their strategies to achieve them.

By collecting this data, you can, in turn, plan your own SEO campaign without relying on instincts and assumptions, that will drive better results. As the old saying goes: knowing your enemy is half the battle, and by knowing how your key competitors are approaching their SEO, you have a much better chance in outranking them.

The post SEO Competitive Analysis: Learning From Your Competitors To Achieve Better Results appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.