DAY 19: Outrank Your Competition

“Success or failure in business is caused more by the mental attitude even than by mental capacities.”

- Walter Scott -

To be the best, you’ve to beat the bests

Top ranking sites all have something in common, and that’s the fact that they have better SEO work than all the other sites.

Not only did they do better with on-site optimization, they are dominating the search engines with their off-site optimization work.

Today I’m going to show you how to outrank those sites!

The Art of War

In order to get a top ranking in the search engines, you need not to have a perfect page, but instead, you need to have a page that is better than your competition.

This may sounds innocent, but it’s a very important concept for you to understand when it comes to SEO.

To outrank your competition, you need to be able to do better than them on 2 levels:

• On-site optimization
• Off-site optimization

Now, what I’m going to say may sounds over simplistic, but way to many of you overlook the importance of the following fact:

“If you don’t know what your competition is doing, how are you going to beat them?”

You need information to be able to gauge their current level and where you stand in comparison.

In general, having a very well optimized site when it comes to onsite optimization alone, will get you all the way to the top 30 results and maybe even to the top 10 depending of the difficulty of your keyword.

That step was previously accomplished by following the recommendation we got from the IBP report yesterday. What is left for us to do now is off-site optimization.

When you make it to the top 30, outranking your competition is all about your inbound links.

The only way you can increase your ranking position is by building more and better quality inbound links than your competition.

Your very first goal should not be to compare yourself to the top ranking page yet, but rather the lowest ranking page of the top 10 results.

The reason is clear; this is the page you need to beat in order to make it to the first page of results. Being on the first page and being on the second page are worlds apart when it comes to SEO results!

Competitive Intelligence

In order for us to outrank this page, we must absolutely know the following information:

• How many backlinks do they have with our keyword in their anchor text? The real ranking strength of a page comes from the amount of backlinks it got with the keyword in the anchor text, this is a number you must beat in order to outrank this page.
• What is the status of those pages that link back? All pages linking back don’t have the same level and amount of popularity and authority, evaluate how many authority backlinks they are getting and get more and better ones than them.
• What are those pages URLs? Those people are linking towards this page that means if you were to get links too from those same pages, you could at least match that page, which is a first step to outrank them.
• How many different domains are they coming from? Remember that even more important than the number of links is also the number of different domains, the more domains is linking toward a page, the more authority and popularity it will acquire.
• What is the keyword density of their anchor text? Anchor text is very important but you don’t want to fall into the Google Link Trap box where you over-optimize your anchor text and end up being penalized for it. Make sure to match the density used by your competitor.
• What anchor text variation are they using? Your competitor is likely to be using different anchor text variations, found out which one they are using, and leverage on this knowledge.

Not only do you need to know this information about your competitor, you also need to know this information about your own page in order to make a proper comparison.

Get the Right Tool for the Right Job

I wish there was a free way to do this, but honestly it’s just not realistic to go through the tens of thousands of backlinks a site has, look on each of those pages what is the anchor text, page rank and other info your need from each of those page, all by yourself manually.

You must get a professional SEO software for this, and if you have any bit of understanding about ROI, you’ll quickly realize that using such tool actually save you money, not only for the results you’ll obtain, but for the time you’ll save.

Remember that your time has a dollar value!

That said the tool I recommend and wouldn’t be doing SEO without is SEO Elite.

The very first step is to make a search in Google for my Keyword, here “SEO Help”.

Since I’m already in the top 10, my goal will be to become the top ranking site for this search term.

Just from this page of results, I learn a lot:

• 286,000,000 that’s a lot of competition here, I’m glad I made it to the top 10 already within 4 months!
• #2 is Google! This means that I will have to beat Google to become #1; easier said than done!
• #1 doesn’t have my keyword in their page title, description, or URL! That means they are super duper tough dudes with their inbound links for that search term! (further analysis tells me that it’s a redirection of a former domain seo-help.com, that explains a bit)

It’s now time for me to fire up SEO Elite! I run a new project to analyze the backlinks of my competitor:

And the keyword analysis of my competitor:

From all the information collected, I now know that:

• 743 different domain names link to my competitor.
• 334 backlinks use “SEO Help” as part of their anchor text.
• 76.1% of the backlinks use “SEO Help” in their anchor text.
• 65.6% of the time, “SEO Help” will be the most prominent term in the anchor text.
• I also have the URLs, PR, Alexa, and other information pertaining to the page linking to my competitor.

The next step is to repeat the search analysis process for my site and compare the results.

Data	Competitor	My Site	Actions to be taken
Domain names	743	1,536	OK
Backlinks	334	130	I need at least 204 more backlinks
Backlinks Density	76.1%	48.3%	I need to increase by 27.8%
Anchor Prominence	65.6%	31.3%	I need to increase by 34.3%

I know now exactly what I need to do in order to outrank my competition and enjoy my search engine domination as #1 in Google for my search term!

If that’s not golden information for you, I don’t know what is.

If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson below.