Every minute 500+ websites go live. And you need to make it in front of your potential customers inspite of that. That is why, before writing anything, you need to do a ton of research.
To stay on top of your competition in the SEO game you need to work both smart and hard. But worry not, there are tools to make your quest easier.
Workflow of creating an awesome piece of content
Once you’ve decided on the topic, you need to do the following:
- Find who you’ll be competing against;
- Come up with how you can do a better job than they did;
- Check if the topic is anywhere close to trending on social media at the moment;
- Find who links to content you compete with;
- Analyze if you will be able to rank for the chosen keyword;
- If yes – get to work.
I know, that sounds like a lot of work. And it is. That’s what good piece of content is worth. But the tools I’ll talk about below will be there to help you.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is your go-to tool when you need to quickly check the popularity of a link or topic on social media. And it’s really important for your topic to be in demand. This way you can quickly gain traction. BuzzSumo shows you sharing stats from different platforms.
In the world this twisted on social media, you can’t but use BuzzSumo to analyze which topics, headings, and content work in your niche and resonate with your potential audience. Examine posts of your competitors and you’ll get an idea if what they did is worth replicating.
Once you’ve written your great piece of content, you can find influencers among people who shared your competitors before and reach out to them directly.
Free trial available.
Ahrefs SEO Toolbar
Like it or not, backlinks are still the most important metric for your website to rank. Not any backlinks, of course. Just the good stuff. Relevant websites with high authority that link to you among other popular and influential domains.
Ahrefs SEO Toolbar helps you find the right backlink opportunities.
There’s plenty of ways for marketers and website owners to use link building:
- find broken links and try replace them with yours;
- reach out to bloggers and try to impress them, so that they mentioned you in their past and future writings;
- publish guest posts and raise awareness about your brand and backlink profile this way.
But pretty much for any link building effort you need a specialized tool. You need to be able to identify your closest competitors, analyze their backlink profile, find what keywords they rank for, and who links to them. After that try to reclaim the links that should be yours. Ahrefs SEO Toolbar helps you do all of that and more.
As I mentioned in the beginning, you need to start with identifying competition. Google your topic or keyword and see who ranks there already.
Look at their domain and url rating and evaluate if you will be able to rank for it. Consider your own domain rating, the quality of content you’re going to have and link building strategy you’re going to use.
Once you’ve read the works of your top competitors and decided to go for it, you need to check who links to them.
Click on BL(backlinks) in Ahrefs SEO Toolbar and collect the perspective leads that are likely to link to you when your post is ready.
14 days free trial available.
Similar Web
After conversion numbers, traffic stats is probably the most cherished metric for a website owner. Every morning they log into GA to see how much visits their marketing efforts brought them.
Similar Web’s browser extension is completely free and gives you not only traffic stats but also a ton of other information that you can use to your benefit.
You can also see who refers to the website, who its audience is and who its competitors are.
Note, that when your website is brand new, you won’t see much data. So it would be better to manually find at least one competitor in Google and start with examining their audience and competition.
Also Similar Web is often used when one needs to decide if the website is worth the effort to guest post on. But it’s better to rely on Domain Rating or Domain Authority of the website for guest posts, because this metric is more likely to determine how much SEO juice you’ll get.
Toolbar is free.
SEO & Website Analysis
If you’ve just launched your first website and you haven’t done any SEO before, you need some general guidance as to how you can optimize your content. This extension can help you with that just fine.
As you go through the top menu of the toolbar, you get advice on what can be improved in website’s SEO.
After a while you’ll form your own SEO checklist and will do it all automatically but in the beginning it’s good to have a shoulder to lean on.
14 days free trial available.
Should you use these tools?
Using all of these tools, or even some of them can improve your SEO game drastically.
Write a piece of content and optimize it with SEO and Website Analysis, then research competition with Ahrefs and Buzzsumo. See who links to the most popular pieces of content on your topic with Ahrefs and start your killer outreach campaign.
Gain quality links, convert visitors into customers, and rank high. Then do it all over again with your next post, study, ebook, video or whatever content you’re creating.
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