• Tweet

I have built many link profiles of the competition. If you have been around SEO for a while, you have probably used tools like Yahoo! Site Explorer, Majestic SEO or Linkscape.

So once you get this knowledge, how does it impact your business? In my experience, not really that much. I have actually found the practice of trying to mimic another site’s link profile a less than fruitful experience. Can it be effective, absolutely! As a matter of fact, it helps in the brainstorming period of SEO to gather intelligence from a myriad of competition and try to mimic the most effective parts of each one.

The 80/20 Rule

I am sure you have seen the 80/20 rule preached before. Spend 80% of your time doing the 20% of activities that have the highest return. There are so many different activities that pull at an SEO Consultant, so many little details. Every detail seems so important and can suck away time. So I have been narrowing down where my time should be spent.

I have discovered that I gain much more benefit in studying my clients, not my competition.

I can try to mimic my competition or I can go directly to the customer and find out exactly what they need and give it to them. In essence, my focus is on my customer, not on SEO. I just use my SEO knowledge to better deliver value to them.

Just so you know, when I say customer, I am not referring to my direct SEO customers in this post. I am referring to the end user, the one who is actually finding the website and buying a product or service.

As an example, lets say that I run an online store that sales tools. In this store I have a section of power drills. I will do some keyword research and begin to SEO for this category. I look at some of my competition linking structure and keyword research and develop a good strategy. I know what it is going to take to get to the next level.

Than I actually go out and find the guys who use power drills on a regular basis. I simply stop at a local construction site and talk to three or four contractors. I call friends who like to work with wood etc. I find out what questions they have and what they actually look for in a drill.

I make a list of these questions and begin to answer them through my SEO. Whether its through blogging, articles or changing the actual text of the product description, I seek to answer their questions. Inevitably, two things occur.

1. Conversion rates increase from good, relevant content that answers the end users questions.
2. Ranking improves as people find the content useful.

How does that help your rankings? The bounce rate metrics will improve because the consumer’s questions are being answered and he is staying on the page. Your content, if organized correctly, is highly relevant to the end user and therefore to the search engines. You naturally attract inbound links.

I will always do manual link building, but I have found that if I take the above approach, I will not have to manually build links for very long, it will just happen.

A link profile is a valuable tool in manually building inbound links. But, creating a customer profile gives you the ability to get natural inbound links and increase customer conversions at the same time.