Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about driving traffic to your website. But you’re not the only one striving to make that happen. Your competitors are vying for rankings as well, and if you don’t know how to outwit them, they can take away many of your leads.

For your online marketing to be successful, you must drive valuable traffic for yourself, and that often means stealing it from your competitors.

Of course, the word “steal” is a bit misleading here. There’s nothing unethical about redirecting traffic to your website — on the contrary, the best way to get that traffic is to create content that’s more beneficial to your users!

But just what does that look like? How can you steal competitors’ traffic effectively? Below, we’ll cover four great tips for making that happen.

Read on to learn more, and then get in touch with us to look into partnering with an SEO agency that’s been in the industry for over 20 years!

1. Learn about the competition

Before you can steal competitors’ traffic, you must know who your competitors even are, and what they’re doing.

Who are your competitors?

Start by figuring out your competitors. You may have some idea of who they are already, of course — odds are you know of at least a handful of businesses you compete against frequently.

Since we’re talking about SEO, though, the best way for us to define competition is by looking at who’s outranking you for relevant keywords.

First, come up with a list of keywords you want to target with your web content. You may already have such a list. If not, you can find good keyword ideas by using tools like KeywordsFX.

Once you have a list ready, do a Google search for each of the keywords on it. Then look at which sites are ranking for those keywords. Those are your competitors. You can click on the results themselves to see what your content is up against.

What are your competitors doing?

Knowing who your competitors are is a great start. But these are only rudimentary measures. To get a complete look at your competition, you’ll want to have access to more detailed information — their site traffic, their page loading speeds, their backlinks.

For that, you’ll need a competitor tracking software like CompetitorSpyFX.

CompetitorSpyFX is a fantastic resource for beating your competition since it can not only let you check competitor website traffic, but also show you exactly what metrics you have to beat to perform better than them in search rankings.

2. Improve on your competitors’ content

Once you start looking at your competitors’ content, you can begin picking out their strengths and weaknesses.

Emulating strengths

Since the main competitors you’ll be looking at are those at the very top of the search results, you can feel confident they’re using some top optimization techniques to rank higher. You can analyze their pages to see what they do to rank higher.

For example, if a competitor seems to be doing particularly well and all of their content is long-form instead of short-form, you can infer that the longer length helps them rank higher. As a result, you can try taking a similar approach with your own content.

You don’t want to steal ideas directly from your competitors, but analyzing your competition’s strengths can help inspire your content strategy.

Improving on weaknesses

Of course, though your competitors will get a lot of things right, none of them will be perfect. You’ll probably find many aspects where they could improve.

If you see that a competitor isn’t quite addressing user intent for a certain keyword, for instance, you can create a piece of content that does a better job of answering the query.

3. Get a boost from backlinks

One thing you can learn from a website traffic checker like CompetitorSpyFX is the number of backlinks on a competitor’s site.

Backlinks are links from external websites that go back to a page on your website. This referral gives the content more credibility with Google, which leads to higher rankings.

Create new backlinks

Since backlinks have such a big impact on SEO, you’ll want to make sure that you get at least a few of them for each piece of content you put out.

One strategy for earning backlinks is to reach out to industry websites and invite them to check out your content. If they like your content, they may link to it on their own pages.

What constitutes a good number of backlinks? It depends. In general, though, you should be more concerned about the quality of your backlinks than the quantity. A select few backlinks from highly credible websites are worth much more than tons of backlinks from forums or social media.

Steal existing backlinks

Building up your own supply of backlinks is great, but did you know you can break down some of your competitors’ supply in the process? One of the best ways to steal competitors’ traffic is to steal their backlinks.

While you’re reaching out to external sites to ask for backlinks, you can target the sites that are currently linking to your competitors.

If you find any broken links on their websites that are in need of updating, and you have a piece of content that would be a good replacement, you can ask them to replace the old links with new links to you. That way you’re not only getting backlinks, but you’re also helping improve those sites.

4. Optimize your web design

A major driver of SEO is how you layout your website. Not only can bad web design deter users from sticking around, but it will also usually cause Google to penalize you in search rankings.

Another great way to beat your competitors, then, is to have a superior web design. That can cover a lot of territory, but two things, in particular, are important to get right: page speed and responsive design.

Page speed load time

Over half of users will abandon a page if it takes more than three seconds to load. That’s why it’s crucial that your pages load quickly. A great way to do this is to compress your images — large, high-resolution images can significantly slow down your loading speed.

Some other tactics for improving your site load time include:

• Using HTTP compression
• Applying stylesheet and script references
• Caching your web pages
• Reducing 301 redirects

When you check competitor website traffic in CompetitorSpyFX, you can see how quickly your competitors’ pages are loading, and how they stack up against your own.

Responsive design

With over half of all Internet traffic coming from mobile, it’s no surprise that mobile optimization plays a fundamental role in helping you drive traffic. In fact, Google ranks content based on how it appears on mobile devices!

One of the biggest mistakes a site can make is to neglect to optimize for mobile. If your competitors make this mistake, it’s good news for you — and if they don’t, it’s more important than ever for you to surpass them with your responsive design.

A good way to see how your and your competitors’ mobile formats stack up is to compare them to their desktop counterparts in a website traffic checker. If desktop traffic is significantly higher than mobile traffic, it may indicate an issue on mobile.

Outpace your competitors with CompetitorSpyFX

Ready to steal your competitors’ traffic and boost your own? If so, consider partnering with WebFX!

Our competitor tracking tool CompetitorSpyFX lets you check competitor website traffic and other metrics, giving you the information you need to come out on top of rankings. To get started with us, give us a call at 888-601-5359 or contact us online today!