Unless you’re fortunate and clever enough to have thought of some product or service that has little or no competition then your website will be competing against some or many others for the attention of your target market.
If you’ve done your research you will already know who the major competitors are and you might also have poured over their websites to see how they’ve designed them. Our SEO SpyGlass review explains a little about the tool we use to do some of that research.
Perhaps you’ve simply looked at the HTML source code of their pages or even visited every page of the site in order to gain an overall picture of how their site works and why it’s ranking higher than yours in the organic search engine results.
You’ll also be aware of the importance of backlinks to your site, but not just any old links that contain your site name or URL as the anchor text. What really counts are links for which the anchor text is one of the key phrases for which you are trying to rank highly.
For example, if your company is called Joe Doe Inc. and you sell mainly wireless routers then you need backlinks that look like this: Wireless Routers from Joe Doe Inc.. If you can succeed in persuading other webmasters to add such links then you’re well on the way to increasing your site’s ranking for those key phrases, but how many do you need? 10? 100?. This is the question that SEO SpyGlass was designed to answer.
SEO SpyGlass exams a competitors website, finds the backlinks and tells you which keywords and phrases are being used as the anchor text in the links to that site. It’s perfectly legitimate and there’s nothing underhand about it as this information is in the public domain. You could spend hours collating it for yourself or pay an SEO consultant to do it for you, or you could invest once in a tool that will do it again and again for a fraction of the price of a consultant’s fee and which frees you up from the time consuming task of doing the research manually.
However, the information this tool can provide doesn’t just include a list of links and anchor text phrases. It also shows the Google, page rank, the Alexa traffic rank, number of links by IP address, keyword density, links from forums, blogs and social media, the link values and the age of the websites that link back. Armed with this knowledge you can develop an SEO strategy which will move your site up the ranking table into a prime position in which to attract all that desirable organic traffic that results from people searching using the keywords and phrases that are the essence of your site’s products or services.
