Why Spying on Your Competitor’s Backlinks and Rankings is Not Enough

Everyone wants to be a winner, so it’s only natural that spying on your competitors may come across your mind from time to time. The good news is that there is a right way to go about gathering information on your competition, but the bad news is that most people do it incorrectly. If you think that spying on your competitor’s backlinks and rankings is enough to turn your floundering site into something that will drive traffic, we’re here to help.

Throughout this article, we’ll discuss the importance of what are often undervalued and overlooked topics of website design, from your content strategy down to the colors you choose for your blog. Yes, we’re that thorough.

1. What’s Your Competitor’s Content Strategy? 

In the interest of sparing you the technical jargon, content strategy is simply the method with which you generate new content for your eagerly waiting audience. With the Internet having access to so much freely available content, a sound content strategy has never been more important.

After all, if a site you frequent stops churning out new content, it’s easy to just move to another website and forget about the old one entirely. This can have obvious repercussions for your business, so it’s necessary to devise a strategy that will keep content popping up on your site in regular intervals.

How does this tie into your competition, though? If you find that your competitors are updating much more frequently than yourself, and thus generating more traffic to their site, then it might be time to look into content generating software. These software tools often package other useful utilities in them, allowing for a more effective advertising competitive analysis.

Oftentimes, these tools will take one piece of content and spin certain words or phrases to create an entirely new piece of content for your visitors. Of course, content strategy is more than just spinning new content and using a competitive analysis tool, it’s about finding the best way to get the most out of the text, video, and pictures that you put on your site for your market.

2. The Importance of Blog Design 

As important as becoming abetter writer may be, it’s equally important that you pay attention to what your readers consider “eye catching.” You might have just written a beautiful piece that you think really captures the emotions of your audience, but it won’t mean anything if no one is reading it.

Everything should be a conscious decision when designing a blog’s layout, from the colors to the banners to the themes used. Look at your blog from the perspective of a new visitor. Does it immediately grab your attention? Is the layout confusing and unintuitive? Does it look too similar to a competitor’s?

That last one is of particular importance. Colors can play an important role in brand association. For one of the best examples, you don’t have to look any further than Coca Cola and Pepsi. One predominantly uses red while the other mainly uses blue to create a distinct dichotomy for customers.

If your competitors tend to favor a certain set of colors in their web design, it might be a wise choice to pick contrasting colors for your own to make sure your site stands out more for new visitors.

“Start writing… Writing about food, writing about wine, writing about liquor, or writing about any of the things that [you] know how to write about.” – Warren Bobrow, The Cocktail Whisperer 

As mentioned in devising a content strategy, the most important part of a successful blog is simply generating the content. If the blog is good and the passion is there, a proper layout and a proper design will only help to increase its value for readers.

3. What Email Marketing Strategy is Right for You? 

So, you’ve spent the past week redesigning your blog and coming up with an exciting new content strategy, but you still don’t see any difference in traffic. Although your initial instinct might be to suspect that you made an error in the previous steps, the answer might lie in your email marketing strategy. Luckily, we’ve come up with a few tips to help you come up with an email marketing strategy that is right for your business.

In the past, a personalized introduction may have been the way to go, since it gave people a sense of value and comfort. In today’s paranoid world of phishing emails and scamming attempts, that same personalized greeting isn’t quite as comforting.

In an interesting twist, researchers have also discovered that there exists a “dead zone” in relation to email subject lines. According to the researchers at Adestra, people are far less inclined to open or respond to an email with a subject line that falls between sixty and seventy characters.

Of course, researchers have also found that one of the best ways to get people to respond to an email is to simply give something away. Everyone enjoys a free gift, so don’t be afraid to take advantage of human nature to get your message across.

You may find in the course of your own research that your competitors have met success with different strategies to engage consumers, but it’s still a good idea to keep these tricks in mind. This way, you’ll be able to enjoy the success that your competitors can’t replicate.

Unless they spy on your own secrets, of course.

For more information on proper email marketing strategies, and even some information on other useful marketing tools, like pay per click software, visit Clickz.

4. How to Spy on Your Competitors Online 

Ultimately, spying on your competitors is about collecting more than just the surface information about their successes. You should be aiming to discover why they’re successful more so than how they’re successful. Armed with nothing but some high traffic keywords simply won’t be enough to give you the success that you crave.

While we’ve previously told you that one of the best ways to improve traffic to your website is to establish a rivalry, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should only focus on what they’re doing to attract their readers. As easy as it is to assume that Burger King only needs to worry about McDonald’s, the truth is that competitors can often turn up in unexpected places. If you want to learn how to research your market, the best thing to do is focus on a range of demographics, not just one specific niche.

“Make sure you take the time to actually know what your craft is… and then go sell the jobs.” – Ben Sardella 

Don’t be afraid to shop your ideas around, or keep notes on what successful marketers are doing that you might be interested in also pursuing. You might not consider them a competitor, yet, but if you do your homework well enough, you’ll soon find that you’re now the subject of envy for both old and young marketers alike. And, really, what’s the point of starting a business online if you can’t make people on the outside just a little bit jealous?

Put simply, the more companies you have to draw information from, the more easily you’ll be able to adapt your current marketing efforts into a winning strategy. Keep an eye on your competitors, sure, but also keep an eye on other marketing efforts from companies that don’t sell similar products or services. Then, when your company begins taking off, your competitors will wonder what you were doing differently and why they didn’t think of it first.

If all of this is too much information to deal with, there’s always outside resources that can be of tremendous help to a budding entrepreneur.

Just remember: spying on your competitors isn’t just about searching for their backlinks and page rankings, it’s about committing to making your website the best site it can be.

What are some interesting ideas you’ve discovered, thanks to your competitors?

Let us know in the comments!