Simple SEO Tools
Today, SEO tools are much more advanced than they have ever been. The major ones have so many features that it can be daunting to use them and even impossible to know them fully, inside and out.
With that being said, as an SEO professional, I have learned a lot of tactics and tricks when it comes to SEO tools. I use several SEO tools for reporting, intelligence, and tactics to take clients to new levels of organic search engine results. After working with different tools throughout my time in the industry, I’ve learned my way around them. Here are my main hacks that you can use to help you be a more effective internet marketing or SEO professional.
Side note – Within this article, I mostly refer to Ahrefs and SEMRush because I use them the most within my practice. I do not get a commission or have any affiliation with these tools—except I pay them a ton of money every month, like you.
Reverse Engineer Competitors Links
This first hack is very simple. You can use different tools to pull your competitor’s backlinks in order to see which ones are best. I personally like to use Ahrefs for this, but you can also use a tool like Majestic SEO. I am not a huge fan of SEMRush for backlink profiles because I have found them to be relatively small and inaccurate for backlink profile.
After you pull their backlinks, you can go inside the spreadsheets and, by using the Ahrefs score, figure out which ones are the best. Once you figure out which ones are best for your competitors, you can try to replicate them. However, be aware—replicating links is not an easy task. It requires a lot of thought and planning. It should go without saying that you want to replicate the same links with at least a score higher than 15. Here are the main three you should want to replicate:
- High-Quality Blog Comments:
Blog comments are not the devil that other SEO articles make them out to be. If your competitors are being mentioned in blog comments, then you should be there, too. The build rel=nofollow links help to make your link profile more balanced and sound.
- Directories and Resources:
These could be lists of companies, different places to buy products, and more. Work with the main webmaster to get a link to your website in the same place.
- Content Mentions:
If there are links within the content of an article, you can try to get the same type of link through submitting editorial content or trying to get mentioned in the same article.
If you keep rinsing and repeating this method long enough, you will score good, quality backlinks. This will help you get more search traffic and sales.
If you want to learn more about reverse engineering, on using SEMRush to reverse engineer your competitors on the SEMRush blog!
Competitor’s Insights
Another hack that can help you is looking at exactly what your competitors rank for in Google. You can use Ahrefs, but I prefer using SEMRush because their database is huge.
