How to Spy on Your Competitors’ Keywords and Steal Their Traffic

Creating a long-term SEO strategy can be expensive and time-consuming. Plus, if you don’t know what you’re doing, your efforts may prove futile. Fortunately, there are ways to drive more traffic to your website without having to invest months of your time into creating a strategy.

You can simply replicate and build on what your successful competitors are already doing.
Analyzing the performance of your competitors regarding SEO is crucial. It’s not just a great way to quickly develop a strategy that will bring you a high return on investment. It’s also an essential aspect of getting ahead and staying there.

Below, we discuss five ways how you can spy on your competitors’ keywords and steal their traffic.

1. Steal your competitors’ backlinks

Generating links to your website is crucial. It shows Google that you’re an authoritative and trustworthy source of information. As a result, Google will reward your website with a high position on its results pages.

More importantly, by generating backlinks to your website, you can increase your exposure and increase your traffic.

Creating a backlink strategy can be challenging. However, you can remove at least some of the hassle from the process by finding out what your competitors are doing.

Open Moz’s Open Site Explorer and enter your competitor’s URL into the search bar. Then, navigate to the section called ‘Compare Link Metrics.’ Scroll down, and you’ll be able to see how many backlinks your competitor has generated. If one of your competitors has generated thousands of backlinks, you can likely learn something about their strategy and – more importantly – steal some of those backlinks for yourself.

Once you’ve chosen which competitor you want to analyse, head to the ‘Inbound Links’ section and set the ‘Link Source’ filter to ‘only external.’ Now, you’ll be able to see exactly where your competitor’s backlinks come from.

Using Moz’s Open Site Explorer, you can view where the backlink leads to (i.e. the title of the page) and the anchor text. Now that you know how and why your competitors have earned backlinks, you can replicate their strategies.

2. Hijack your competitors’ keywords

Keyword research can take a long time, but it’s a crucial part of your SEO strategy. If you want to streamline the process, you can find out which keywords your competitors rank highly for and then try to outrank them.

Alexa is one of the best tools available to spy on your competitor’s performance regarding keywords. You can view the top five keywords your competitor’s rank for without having to create an account. However, if you do create an account, which requires a paid subscription (though you can give Alexa a trial run for free), you can find out how difficult a particular term is to rank for. There are bound to be some keywords that your competitors currently aren’t targeting. Plus, you might find that some of the keywords that your competitors are targeting are easy to rank for.

3. Create better content

If you want to earn a position on Google’s first page, you need to create compelling content, which means it’s a good idea to find ways to improve the content that’s already at the top of the results page.

According to Orbit Media data, most blog posts are just over 1,000 words in length. However, posts that earn a position in the top ten search results tend to be at least 1,750 words long. So, if you find that a competitor is outranking you with regards to one of your target keywords, you can build on their content to earn a high position on the results page.

4. Improve your website’s loading speed

Nowadays, people expect a web page to load almost instantly. The longer it takes for your website to load, the higher your bounce rate will be, which will lower your search ranking. According to Google, companies within almost every industry could improve their loading speed. Make your website faster before they do, and you could outrank them on the results pages.

The easiest way to make your website load faster is to compress your images, which you can do using a free plugin, WP Smush.

5. Partner with an SEO agency

Admittedly, spying on your competitors isn’t straightforward. If you don’t have the time or resources to stay on top of your competition, you might want to let a team of professionals do the hard work for you.

We’ve been a leading SEO agency for over ten years, and we always remain up to date with the latest SEO techniques, which includes spying on the competition and stealing their traffic.

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