Spying and intruding into other’s privacy is a very bad habit and punishable by law in many states… but it is vital as well as necessary for your online business.

What does it mean by spying your competitors?

As we all know that to reach at the top there are two ways. First one is to follow the basics, input your hard work and wait for the time when you come at the top. Second way is to spy on those who are already at the top, find out their strategy and implement the same for your business but using better tactics.

Hard work and persistence is no doubt a sure shot way to get success and patience is virtue we all know. But if you ask me which route I will take. I will surely take the second one because life is very short and I cannot give 3, 4 years to visualize my success.

For all of you who are interested in the latter one, today I will discuss some points on how to spy your competitor and reverse engineer their strategy and get to position number one on the organic search( especially Google), overthrowing them out of the game.

Can you think what would be the value of keyword “weight loss” or “car insurance” at the first position of Google?

Let’s check… for the purpose I am using www.semrush.com

Let us take two examples, fist one is “weight loss”, if we check Google the number 1 rank for this keyword goes to website www.webmd.com , now check it in Semrush.

We get the following data. The average CPC for keyword weight loss is $2.63 and the search volume is 450k. Now do the simple math 450k x $2.63. According to Semrush the website is getting search engine traffic worth $15584k.

Our second example is “car insurance”. While I was checking the ranking I got www.progressive.com on number 1, now checking it with Semrush, it is receiving organic traffic worth $24967k.

The data from Semrush may not be perfect, but if we assume only 10% of the figures, you can easily calculate what the worth of being number 1 on Google is.

So I am quite impressed with your argument… now which things I would like to spy on?

Basically you would like to spy on keywords they are ranking organically, keywords they are using for PPC, their daily ads budget, sites which are linking to your competitor,

Organic keywords: find out the keywords for which your competitor is ranking organically and the traffic those keywords attract. After analyzing these keywords you can plan your long time strategy for SEO, starting with the long tail keywords of main phrases and gradually using the short tails.

PPC Keywords: The basic idea behind finding the paid keywords is if they are paying consistently for some keywords to appear on paid result then those keywords must be converting for them. After you compile the list of their paid keywords, view their landing pages. Then plan your strategy using those converting keywords and their long tail phrases. Design your landing page better than them and you will surely hit a jackpot. Also look their daily PPC budget, the more the better.

Backlinks: Find out how many backlinks your competitor have, which sites are linking then and what the anchor texts are used in their backlinks. For this purpose you can use www.backlinkwatch.com and you will know the anchor text of the backlinks, their PR and whether they are follow or Nofollow. You can also use Yahoo Site Explorer for getting the backlinks data for any website. Never depend on the Google backlinks for a website, as Google displays numbers much less than the actual.

Other online tools you can use:

Keyword spy

Spyfu

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