Search Engine Optimization

After determining who your top competitors are on the search engine results pages, it’s time to start spying on them to find out how they achieved their rankings.  Spying on your competitors is necessary in the world of search, especially if you’re trying to rank for highly competitive terms.  Your competitors leave a trail behind them when they build their SEO campaigns, and you can use that information, which is readily available, to your advantage.

Find Keywords

If you want to find out why a company ranks so well for a particular keyword, you can use spy tools like ISpionage and Keyword Spy to determine which keyword phrases are most commonly used in their website content as well as which links they use to rank for that keyword.

You can also use the free Google Adwords keyword tool to get suggestions for keywords based on the URL.  Simply choose the “website content” option and then type in your competitor’s URL to view keyword suggestions.  The information provided will help you brainstorm and develop an effective keyword strategy.

View Page Source

View a web page’s source, or source code, if you want to see both visible and invisible elements of a web page.  When you view a web page’s source, you can see meta tags, alt tags, and other HTML content, giving you a sneak peek at your competitor’s site. Select View > Page Source from the menu in your browser in order to view page source.

Use Alexa

The Alexa database provides loads of useful information about your competitors’ websites.  On Alexa, you’ll find screenshots of a website’s home page, traffic statistics, information about the quality of inbound links, the site owner’s name and contact information, the domain age, and more.  The Alexa database may not always be 100% accurate, but nevertheless, it provides good, general info about different websites.

Check Backlinks

There are several free tools available online, such as Backlinkwatch and Yahoo Site Explorer, which enable you to view all of the websites where your competitors have backlinks as well as the anchor text of those links.  The anchor text is really what you should pay attention to when spying on your competitors’ backlinks since it is the most telling.  It’s also helpful to determine where your competitors are getting backlinks so you can get some for yourself.

Spying on your competitors helps you figure out why they rank better for certain keywords and why their overall page rank is higher.  But spying on your competitors doesn’t just help you determine why your competitors are doing better; it helps you move full speed ahead so you can eventually beat them at their own game and achieve top rankings.