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The goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to drive traffic to your website. But even if you invest in good SEO practices, you’re not the only one doing so—your competitors are also optimizing their web pages, targeting keywords, and working to increase their ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Since you’re competing for search engine traffic and visibility with other business-to-business (B2B) companies in your industry, the competition is fierce. If you’re not at the top of your game, a lot of the traffic (and visitors, and leads, and buyers) you deserve will be taken away by your competitors.
The good news is that if you can figure out what your competitors are doing and then do it better, you can steal traffic from them and drive it to your own website.
Here’s how to start using digital marketing and SEO tactics to outrank and attain high-value leads from your competitors.
Is Stealing Competitors’ Web Traffic a Good Idea?
Rest assured that “stealing” is just a figure of speech here. We aren’t describing anything illegal or even unethical. In fact, there’s nothing underhanded about redirecting traffic from your competitors to your own website.
Why?
Because the best way to “steal” competitors’ traffic is to create content that is more valuable, more helpful, and better targeted to your audience.
By adding more value than what your competitors are providing, you will rank better for relevant keywords, and new audiences will find you instead of your competitors. And that’s all we mean by “stealing” traffic.
Now, let’s dive into how exactly this process works.
5 Ethical Ways to “Steal” Website Traffic from Your Competitors
How can you effectively steal competitors’ traffic? Follow these tips to improve your search engine ranking and beat out the competition.
1. Find Competitors’ Top Traffic-Generating Keywords
Before you can steal web traffic from your competitors, you have to discover what keywords they are ranking for. Then you can create a list of relevant, high-traffic keywords and start targeting them with your own content.
Semrush’s Keyword Gap tool allows you to see the keywords your competitors’ websites rank for as well as how well they rank for each keyword. You can export that data into a spreadsheet and determine which keywords are valuable to your business.
Look for keywords that fit these parameters:
- Keywords that your competitors rank for
- Keywords that are valuable and relevant to your business
- Keywords that you haven’t developed content around
- Keywords that you could use to optimize existing content
By finding the keywords your competitors rank for that your website does not, you can identify gaps in your current content strategy. Once you create a keyword list, you can start developing content that fills those keyword gaps and drives traffic from your competitors to your own web pages.
READ: 10 Best B2B SEO Tools to Increase Organic Traffic (Freemium and Paid)
2. Create High-Quality Content with the Targeted Keywords
To steal traffic from your competitors, your goal should be to create high-quality content that targets those high-traffic keywords you discovered during your research.
Focus on creating better content than your competitor. In other words, prioritize high-quality content that provides value to your readers. Additionally, consider how you can optimize existing website content to target those high-traffic keywords.
More research can improve your content development process. Find the top-ranking pages on your competitors’ websites and review the content. What type of content are they posting? What best practices are paying off, and how can you emulate their strengths? What are their content shortcomings, and how can you improve on their weaknesses?
It’s this type of targeted, relevant, valuable content that will attract readers and improve your SERP ranking.
3. Leverage Competitors’ Backlinks
A backlink is a link on an external website that goes to a page on another website. These links play a significant part in a website’s ranking on search engines. Websites with more backlinks are more likely to rank at the top of SERPs. That’s why one of the best ways to steal traffic from your competitors is to find out which websites are redirecting traffic to their websites, approach those websites, and ask them to replace the old backlinks with a new link to your website.
With SEO tools like Ahrefs or Semrush, you can see the number of backlinks on a competitor’s website, find out which domains are linking to specific pages, and create a roadmap of websites to target for backlinks. On Semrush, you can also rank listed backlinks by trust score to see which backlinks are the most valuable.
The next step is to reach out to external sites and ask for backlinks, focusing on domains that currently feature links to your competitors. Then, if you have a content piece that would be a good fit, you can ask them to replace those backlinks with links to your web pages.
Keep in mind that website owners who currently have backlinks to your competitors’ content aren’t going to link to your content instead unless it provides their readers with more valuable—making high-quality, informative, and engaging content a prerequisite to this process.
4. Be Faster Than Your Competitors
A major part of your ranking on SERPs is the page speed of your website. Since slower page speeds will make visitors more likely to abandon your page, which leads to Google penalizing the website, your goal should be to have a faster website than your competitors.
As you use various tools to analyze the web traffic of your competitors, note how quickly their top-ranking pages are loading and compare their speeds with your own. If you optimize your website and decrease page loading times, you will have an edge over your competition.
While there are several ways to help your pages load quickly, the most effective way is to compress your images—large images, especially those with a higher resolution, can significantly slow down the loading speed of your web pages. Other solutions include reducing 301 redirects, using HTTP compression, and caching your web pages.
READ: A Digital Marketing Audit for B2B Companies: The Ultimate Guide
5. Generate Traffic from Referral Sites
Referral traffic describes visitors that find your website via a method other than a major search engine, like by clicking on a link on another website or on a social media post. Google and other search engines consider these links from referral sites as a sign that the referred website is a trusted source, leading to increased rankings.
This type of traffic may include anything from content partners and affiliates to news coverage.
The strategy for generating traffic from referral sites is similar to how you gain backlinks. With Similarweb, you can see both the incoming traffic and marketing channels that drive your competitors’ traffic. Semrush and Ahrefs also have similar features that can find the pages that are sending traffic to your competitors.
Then, you can put together a list of referral sites and start building relationships with them. Reach out to the referral site admins on LinkedIn, leave comments on existing blogs, and contact website owners directly. The most important part is to think of the content you will offer them in exchange and what value it will provide to their visitors.
The Best Tools to Spy on Your Competitors
Spying on your competitors—also known as competitor monitoring—is a powerful tool in your digital marketing arsenal. With an online competitor monitoring tool, you can gather accurate data on your competitors, discover what is working for them (and what isn’t), and use the insights you gain from these tools to increase your search engine ranking.
While there are seemingly endless SEO tools on the market that B2B companies use to monitor the web traffic of their competitors, we recommend starting with these three powerful tools.
Semrush
Semrush is an industry-leading SEO marketing tool—and its features also allow you to spy on your competitors’ traffic.
With Semrush, you can see what keywords your competitors are ranking for, identify gaps in your keyword arsenal, and learn how much traffic your website gets relative to your competition. With this data, you can create a strategy to take traffic from your competitors and improve your overall search engine ranking, especially for relevant keywords.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another SEO tool that includes resources to steal traffic from your competitors. This software not only analyzes the keyword rankings and backlinks of your B2B company’s website but also compiles lists of the keywords your competition ranks for that you don’t. You can also see how much traffic your competitors are getting from ranking keywords and where that traffic is coming from.
To further increase your search engine ranking, Ahrefs will also help you audit and optimize your website, from fixing technical SEO errors to notifying you of slow page loading speeds that hinder your overall performance on search engines.
Similarweb
Similarweb was built to help digital marketers like you analyze the web traffic of your competitors. It provides a substantial amount of data and web traffic statistics so you can effectively measure your competitors’ online activity. This software lets you see both an overview of a website’s traffic and where that traffic originated.
From seeing your competitors’ customer journey maps to identifying new opportunities for generating traffic, you can use the sharp detail provided by Similarweb to decipher what does and doesn’t work for your competitors.
Generate More Traffic and Optimize Your Digital Presence with OneIMS
Don’t let the competition intimidate you. Instead, use your competitors as a tool to help you get to the top.
By analyzing the source of your competitors’ web traffic, you can determine their strengths and weaknesses as well as get ideas on how to increase your ranking on search engines—and quickly start rising above the competition.
The good news is that you don’t have to take on this work alone. Let us help.
At OneIMS, our team of digital marketing and SEO experts is ready to help your B2B company optimize your website, increase your ranking on SERPs, and steal internet traffic from your competitors. We have the strategies, solutions, and tools you need to identify new opportunities for web traffic, create outstanding, high-ranking content, and launch a new SEO framework that will bring new leads to your business.
We have a long history of working with companies in a variety of industries to develop innovative and data-driven marketing solutions, and we pride ourselves on producing measurable and sustainable results.
But you don’t have to take our word for it. View testimonials from our clients and read our blog to get an idea of our training, experience, and track record of success.
Are you ready to take the next step in generating more traffic and optimizing your digital presence? Schedule a consultation with us today to get started.
