8-Step Off-Page SEO Plan, Step 4: Replicate
Replicate, Step 4 of the 8-Step Off-Page SEO Plan, goes back to the ancient Chinese proverb “know thy enemy and know thyself.” To have a successful campaign you need to always outrank the competition and to do so you must understand their success.
Analyze websites outranking yours and find out what sites are giving them credit with links, mentions, and citations so you can find out what search engines currently prioritize in that vertical.
Sun Tzu would attest, there’s no better way to catch up and neutralize the competition than to replicate their link-building, social media, and citation efforts.
This can be done using tools like Majestic or LinkResearchTools for total link analysis. For analyzing local information, use Brightlocal, Moz, WhiteSpark, and Knowem.
A combination of these will find 95% of the citations, links, references, and images contributing to a website’s ranking success.
But never replicate a site that appeared in search results overnight. They’re probably using high-risk ranking strategies that are penalized by search engines – and in our experience that happens sooner rather than later.
Some examples of risky tactics to avoid are:
- Paid bloggers
- Link networks
- Paid or “sponsored” links
- Free software with embedded links
- Domain forwarding manipulation
- Site cloaking
All these will result in ranking penalties.
In other words, don’t follow your competition down a dark alley! You might both get mugged!
How well do you know your competence?.
