How To Outrank Your Competitors In 3 Simple Steps

This is a guest post by Abrar Mohi Shafee.

At the age of science and technology, marketing and promotion are made so easy that it could be done just from our homes. Just few clicks and hours on computers can promote our services to thousands of people. The epoch-making thing behind the scene is internet marketing. Among these marketing strategies, the most important role is played by Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process to spot a webpage to the top of search engine results page (SERP). Search engines are the biggest source of traffics because millions of people use them daily. So, there are higher possibilities to get leads to our website, blog or any other pages. The process is getting so common to all that a huge amount of people is involved in making career with SEO. That is a good choice but the main obstacles they face are the competitors.

The optimizers mainly experience that the competitors are too strong in their position. Even after working very hard, they couldn’t find out any fruitful result. Sometimes they lose all of their hopes to rank. I think it would be but that doesn’t mean to lose hope. It is because the competitors worked well rather than you. Unless one ensures the optimization is greater than his competitors, there won’t be any success. So, let’s discuss today how to outrank these competitors with just three simple steps.

The Requirements Before Starting Our Process

SEO activities are seen everywhere over the internet. That’s why it has gotten too spammy. To eradicate these spams, search engines like Google are taking necessary steps. The search engine’s sensation Google is truly aware of spams and I think they are capable to filter all types of spam. In 2014, the SEO process is seemed too hard for spammers, but not for unique optimizers. So, first make sure you are not among them.

In SEO, the first and foremost requirements are contents. There will be no positive results without high quality contents. Everyone could write contents, but all will not be considered high quality. So make sure you are writing informative contents that add value to the visitors. Otherwise, all of our efforts will be wasted.

On page optimization has the second highest value in the seo process. After contents, optimize all of your on page factors. You should have a look at Moz’s on page seo guide. If you have implemented these, you can advance to the main process.

The Top 3 Steps to Follow In Order to Outranking Competitors

1. Find Out Your Toughest Competitors

   First of all you have to find out your competitors in your niche keyword. In this tutorial, I am putting on “Blogging Tips” keyword. Just search your niche keyword on Google to get the top 10 competitors. Here are my search results:

   Here we can see in the results, www.bloggingtips.com at the top. So our toughest competitor is that one. So, we want go with the first one and then the rest.

2. Analyze Your Competitors Backlinks

   Now we have to analyze the competitors backlinks. Backlinks mean, how many pages are linking to that page. Backlinking is the main off-page optimization process since backlinks determine how important a page is. So, if we want to rank higher than a particular page, we need higher referring pages or backlinks to our own page. We are going to get help from some tools.

   To analyze a site’s backlinks, there are a ton of tools to use. Some of these are for online use and some of these are for desktops. Among online backlink tools, the best ones are Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, Majestic SEO and Backlink Watch. These online tools have both paid and free versions. But for seeing the full backlink report, you will need paid versions. On the other hand, the best desktop tools are SEO SpyGlass and SEOBooks Backlink Analyzer. These also require paid versions for showing all backlinks. So, you should get any of these tools for full report.

   In this situation, I am going to use SEO SpyGlass because it is comfortable and provides extra features. So, insert your competitor's url in any of these tools and see the results. Here is my result for www.bloggingtips.com on SEO SpyGlass:

   Now we can see on the report how many pages are linked and how these were linked to the competitor's page. There will be additional information such as page rank, title, description, directory listing, nofollow, dofollow and so on. You can get any of your required information.

3. Look For Backlinking Opportunities From Those Pages

   Now you have to look into those backlinks and look for opportunities to create backlinks to your own pages. Ranking mainly depends on high quality backlinks. So the competitor is exactly ranking for those backlinks. So if you also could get backlinks from those pages, you are going to rank for sure.

   So, that's the final step. Look into every back linked page, find backlinking opportunities and link to your own resource. After you have done it, wait till the crawler crawl those pages.

Additional Tips To Bear In Mind

• There would be thousand of links available in the backlink report. But all of these are not necessary. You should check which page has higher domain authority, page rank, domain rank and other resources. If you think you are looking into a good page, you could link. But keep in mind bad links could negatively affect your ranking.
• Make variations in anchor texts. Otherwise upcoming Google updates could destroy your site. You should focus on branding first and then keywords.
• Keep good ratio between nofollow and dofollow links. Google loves natural links. If you are only creating nofollow or dofollow backlinks, it would be seemed spammy. So, keep up a good proportion among them.

Final Words About This Effective Outranking Process

SEO is the best combination of off page and on page optimizations. If you only consider only one of them, you won’t be able to see good results. The best practice is combining all in your strategy. First do on page SEO and then apply the process as specified above. If you could do this properly, you are going to have a good result for sure.

Wish you all the best for outranking your competitors through this process.

About the author
Abrar Mohi Shafee is the author and founder of Blogging Spell. He is proficient in writing blogging and seo guides mainly for beginners. He has recently written an exclusive guide about wordpress robots.txt file. Besides this, he also works in some online freelance marketplaces.