Competitor backlink analysis
Yesterday I did some analysis of the links my organic competitors have. The competitors had very few linking domains in general. As for the links that I could find:
- influencer marketing links
- dofollow-links from content marketing campaigns
- a surprising amount of links from basic comment spamming
I could also see how some competitors had built their own PBN. I can see how some of these links might generate some traffic. Others, not so much.
Content strategy for SEO
The second and more interesting thing I looked into were strategies for content marketing.
My main ideas from this process are:
- I have mostly gotten links and traffic to blog posts where I have either made a long-form guide or done the skyscraper method of making something better and more thoroughly than anyone else
- I could definitely go for the “stats and data” approach. I read a ton of research and I should probably incorporate this into my posts. For example, I love Vanguard white papers.
- One more thing I understood is that as people read things on mobile, I have to get them to their goal as fast as possible.
I was also looking into the general strategies of producing content. The strategies I saw were:
- Find your own tilt. I love how Mr. Money Mustache has done this in the personal finance space. He has found his own tilt and then produces content around this.
- Minimal content for maximum effect. This is kind of similar in that you will try to be really careful of what you write.
- Skyscraper method. This is a very opportunistic way of content production where you do better what is known to generate backlinks.
- Pillars and clusters. In this method, you try to produce content around a semantic map instead of keywords per se. The idea is that one long-form content could catch multiple keywords.
- Keyword-based hierarchical exact match. Here you are really going for a clear search intent behind a keyword and then try to grab that one keyword. Here you might miss out on a lot of hidden intent that is never put in as a Google search query.
I don’t know if I miss out on any major ones here. For some reason I am not quite satisfied with any of them. I do however know that implementing any single one of these will get me in a better position than where I am currently.
Some nice sources:
- https://moz.com/blog/build-content-marketing-strategy (Tilt)
- https://neilpatel.com/blog/44-content-marketing-resources/
- https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/guides/ultimate-guide-to-remarkable-content/part-0/
- https://backlinko.com/skyscraper-technique
- https://fizzle.co/sparkline/50k-in-first-month
- https://www.quicksprout.com/blogging/
Plotting a website as a graph
I was also looking into how I could plot my site (and competing sites) as a graph to get a sense of the topic clusters.
My idea here was to make a plot with:
- page
- backlink strength
- main keywords (LSI)
- links to other content
This could give me a nice plot of the content strategy utilized by the competition. I could do with the Gephi, albeit badly. I found a presentation from five years ago where someone tried something similar: https://www.slideshare.net/paradigmatecnologico/analysis-of-websites-as-graphs-for-seo-v1
Markus Ossi 