The great thing about the internet is that your competitions underwear is showing. Seriously, they think they might be hiding their website from you, they think they might be hiding their processes and practices from you. They better guess again. Thanks to a wide variety of tools and just the way the internet is put together it’s very easy to see what your competition is up to.

At the very least, you can see the impact of your competition’s actions. The internet is built in such a way that websites is linked to each other and pass information to each other. When you see this page relationships, you can figure out crucial pieces of information that can give you a competitive advantage. You have to remember this when trying to build authority pages.

In this day in age, you need to constantly work on building your authority. As Google continues to crack down on spam in google search engine algorithm continues to evolve. The common denominator in all these mutations, evolutionary development and updates has been an ever increasing focus on authority. The good news is that you don’t have to go through the hard process of coming up with your own authority pages. You can build initial authority using your competition information. Thanks to many tools and also the way the internet operates. It is relatively easy to learn from your competition so you can build authority pages. Follow the discussion below so you can learn how to get authority page ideas from your competitors backlink profile.

Why Backlinks?

Why use backlinks for authority? You have to understand how search engines look at links. Each link represents a vote. Websites will not link to your website if they don’t trust you. Web pages lend you some of their credibility with their visitors by linking to you. At some level or other, a link basically says to a visitor of a page that whoever made that page trusts the pages they are linking out to. This is how search engines look at links. They are measures of trusts. The more links point of particular a page, the more the search engines think that page is trusted or has value. Conversely, if a page is opened and has no inbound links. Chances are it is a low value page. You have to understand the concept of authority pages based on how it relates to links. If a page is truly an authority page, then it would have a lot of links coming in.

All these remote websites and pages linked to that particular page because they think it is useful, they think it contains credible information. This is why it’s crucial to consider your competitions backlink profiles of certain of your competitions pages in your effort in building authority pages. At the very least, this information shows you what kind of content your competition has that other people in your niche or industry consider authoritative useful or credible. It all falls down on backlinks. The good news is, you can use many simple tools to see your competitors backlink profile.

Use Ahrefs to Get your Competitor’s Backlink Profile

Ahrefs is an online tool that allows you to take a peek at your competitions backlinks. All you need to do is to enter the url of your competition or enter the specific url page and you would see the number of backlinks going towards that page. You can also see which of those backlinks come from other sides instead of the same side the page located in. This piece of information is very important because, from a numerical perspective you can see how popular a particular competitor pages as mentioned above. The more outside websites and outside pages linked to a particular page the higher the chance that that page is useful or credible. Ahrefs does a great job of listing out your competitors backlinks. It’s also sorts, whether this links come from within your competitor’s site or from outside third-party sites.

Use Ahrefs’s Top Pages to Find your Competitions Winning Content

Now that you have entered your competitions url into ahrefs, ahrefs should have produced a backlink report of the links hittingyour competitions pages of the backlinks pointing your competitions pages. Your next step is to click on the top pages tab of ahrefs. Ahrefs will also list in descending order the most popular pages your competition has. Ahrefs measures popularity in terms of backlinks. When you click that tab, you will see the most popular pages at the top.

Load your Competition’s Popular Pages to Open Site Explorer

There is a free tool available called opensiteexplorer. This tool measures the backlinks of a particular url. However, for the purposes of this tutorial post. You are going to use open site explorer to get a score called page authority. Page authority is a measure of the usefulness of particular the page. Now that you have used ahrefs to find the most popular pages on your competition’s website. You have put the top 20 or top 30 pages through open site explorer to get these pages authority rankings. Take note of this piece of information. You will need this data when making strategic decisions later on regarding which pages to replicate.

Double Check the Page’s Social Impact with Netpeak Checker

Now that you have filtered your ahrefs initial data dump with open site explorer. The next stage of the analysis is to cross reference social signals. One other key measure of online popularity is how many times a particular web page has been shared on twitter, facebook, pinterest and other social network. When you download and install netpeak checker, you can cross reference your competitions urls against their popularity in a social networks. You need this piece of information to figure out your return on investment or return on effort. This is a major project, not only will you been doing this process for one competitor, you’ll be doing it for all your competition. It is so easy to waste a lot of time and effort and emotional energy chasing after ghosts. The more data you have, the more effective your
process at filtering will be.

Remember: Focus on Return on Investment/Return on Effort

For you to make money online, you have to always focus on ROI. It is very easy to make money online, anybody with more than two brain cells can make money online. The problem is, not all these activities satisfy the basic ROI analysis. In other words, if you decide to do something to make money that activity should yield the most money for the least amount of effort. This is the most basic measure of ROI. You have to focus on return on effort otherwise you might end up doing things that don’t really generate much money and you wear yourself out. You can definitely wear yourself out with all the research outlined above. Sure, you’d be using these automated tools but, at the end of the day you still need to use your brain to filter through all these data and then create a content that is similar to this winning content. That takes effort, that takes time, that takes energy.

It is too easy to waste these assets chasing after the wrong target. When you focus on ROI, you work to replicate the most popular pages first and then you work your way down. The reason you are doing this is because you want to focus on the most successful parts of your competitions online presence. In other words, focus on where they are strongest and then proceed downwards. You can not proceed where they are weakest and really just takes shots at the dark.

Some Key Ideas on Improving your Competitions Work

It is very easy to say that you are going to improve on your competitions content. It is very easy to imagine that you would come up with something better. Don’t get fooled into a sense of complacency. Just because you think you have a clear idea as to why your competitions pages suck or why they failed to achieve a certain behavior in their visitors, doesn’t mean that you’re correct. You have to have a clear plan of action. Otherwise, you might just end up copying their content. Get this clear in your head, if you are just going to simply copy your competitions content. You’re not going to get a competitive advantage. If you’re going to be doing exactly what they are doing, you’d be better off not trying at all. Why? You’re basically just operating at their level.

The whole point of this exercise is to create authority by delivering where they failed to deliver. It’s all about authority. This is the key to figuring out how to improve your competitions work. Once you already know what works for them, you have then focus on how you can maximize authority for you to get a competitive advantage.

Here are just the usual suspects in improving reverse engineered competitor authority pages:

Updated information. A lot of your competitor pages contain still outdated information, you can get a competitive advantage when you update that information.

Better information. A lot of your competitor pages, you would be surprised to find out, are actually inaccurate. There are lots of stereotypes and plain misunderstanding out there. The internet is a field with ignorance, don’t let Wikipedia fool you. There’s a lot of bogus pages out there. If you provide better information in the form of information people can trust and information that is accurate, more people will find you authoritative.

Clearer information. There are many cases of competitors posting up updated and highly accurate information. The problem is this content doesn’t have full power in the eyes of your target audience because it’s unclear or it’s presented in a very confusing way. It’s not uncommon for online publishers to write content like they are talking to a master degree or PhD holders. A lot of concepts are framed in terms of jargon or they intend to write in a convoluted way. You get a competitive advantage when you reverse engineer this content and presented in a very clear to the point manner.

Better graphics. As the old saying goes. “A picture is worth a thousand words.” You can lay out a really up to date and highly accurate and clear information. However, if you want to drive the message, you need to use pictures, you need to use graphics. This is why infographics is so popular nowadays. Infographics can really summarize, otherwise bulky content into a short or easy to understand compact form.

Better videos. Just as the picture is worth a thousand words. How many words do you think a video is worth? Videos after all is collections of many pictures. If you use white board videos or animated videos that really simplifies otherwise complicated concepts in a very graphical and easy to understand why. Your content becomes way more authoritative than your competition. Your competition can talk until they’re blue in the face. They can show all the fans in infographics they want. However, if there is no overarching and simplifying factor like a nice short video. They are operating at a competitive disadvantage. Use this to your advantage.

Other improvement tools. There are two other powerful content improvement tools that you can use. You can create a slide show based on your improved content and share that slideshow on slidesheer. Another powerful authority boosting content strategy you can pursue is to interview the acknowledge experts on the particular topic that you are writing about and get their opinion regarding the key elements that you cover in your blog post or article.

By using the key measure search engines used to measure online trust you can reverse engineer your competition authority pages. You can use this information to gain a competitive advantage over your competition. You can present the material in a way they can’t present it. You can improve the material, you can make it clear regardless by using backlinks as a key signal in determining which content to reverse engineer. You can work to bury your competition. They might not even realize what hit them.