How to Steal Your Competitor’s Organic Traffic

So you want to steal your competitor’s organic traffic, or maybe you just want to make sure that your business is landing on the same search results as what your competitor already ranks for. Then stick with me until the end of this article, because I’m about to give you five simple steps that you can start taking today to figure out exactly what pages are working best for your competitors and how to actually start outranking them.

By the end of this article, you’re going to have a clear game plan that you can take starting today to turn your competitor’s traffic into yours.

Step #1: Figure out what drives traffic to your competitors

The first step we need to take if we want to steal our competitor’s organic traffic is we need to figure out what’s already giving them traffic. Why take the hard road when our competitors have already done the hard work? To do so, I’m going to use SEMRush, but you’re more than welcome to use any other free tools such as Ubersuggest if you don’t have SEMRush.

That being said, if you’ve never tried SEMRush, I highly recommend it. And I’ve teamed up with them to give you a 14-day trial if you use the link here. The key action item we’re going to be aiming to do here is to identify the top three to five ranks pages for our competitor.

So, let’s jump into a real-world example. For this article, I’m going to use the example of soccerlifestyle.com. It’s an affiliate site that provides a ton of different reviews of different soccer equipment that players need. Here you can see that I’m plugging in soccerlifestyle.com into SEMRush, and I can see that they currently rank for about 1700 keywords and they get 1.8K in traffic every single month.

The next thing I’m going to do is I’m just going to go ahead and click view all organic keywords. And from there, what I can do is I can simply rank my results by the percentage of traffic. And that will tell me which pages are most likely giving them a ton of traffic.

To filter down the results even more, what I like to do is look for keyword difficulty scores of less than 80 and a word count greater than or equal to three. So, I’m going to go ahead and do that right now. I’m going to plug into advanced filters, select keyword, difficulty, less than 80 at another condition, which is going to be the word count is greater than three.

All right. So, from this filter, you can see a few different results that are really interesting. The first thing that you’ll notice is that the search term, what is a cap in soccer is giving them a ton of potential traffic. And that’s clear because of the fact that there are 4,400 people estimated to be searching this term every single month and they’re ranked in the sixth position.

So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and open up that article in another tab and I’ll get to it in a little bit, but I’m first going to still do a little bit more digging to figure out some of their other top performing posts. And what I’ll notice is that there’s also a top performing post with, how long has halftime in soccer.

So, this is a situation where they’re ranked fifth. It makes up 5.2, 6% of their traffic, and the term gets 1900 searches every single month. Following the same model, as I look to the next example, I can see that the search term, how to deflate a soccer ball is also something that gives them a lot of traffic. They’re ranked second here, and it gives them 4.2, 1% of their traffic and this search term gets 590 results every single month.

The reason why I like to sort by keyword difficulty less than 80 and a word count greater than three is that it allows you to find some of the longer long tails that you wouldn’t necessarily find right off the bat, if you were to look at the overall view. So, it allows you to see some keywords that are a little bit less competitive than just every single keyword that this site ranks for.

Bonus tip for step one, if you have SEMRush, or if you’re on the trial version, you can go to the pages view right here. And what it’ll output is it’ll actually output the top performing pages for this domain overall. And so what you can see here is that the top performing pages are how long has time and soccer, how to deflate a soccer ball and what is a cap in soccer. So, that’s another great way that you can quickly figure out which pages to focus on in terms of your efforts.

Step #2: Dig into the backlink profile of a particular page.

Now let’s jump into step number two, which is where we’re going to dig into the backlink profile of these particular pages. Now that we got some top performing posts, we’re going to check them against a backlink checker. I like to use Ahrefs’ backlink checker tool because it’s free and it gives some great results.

So, let’s go ahead and do that. So, what I’m gonna do here is I’m going to copy and paste the URLs of the posts that I found that were really popular in my SEMRush analysis into the backlink checker. Here’s the post on how long has halftime in soccer. This was one of their top performing posts. So I go ahead and paste that in, click check for backlinks, complete the captcha and from there, what I’m going to see is that this page has no backlinks. So that is awesome. And that is perfect for us if we were creating a soccer website.

The reason why is because what this means is that these guys are ranking really well for the search term, how long is halftime in soccer without any other domains linking to this particular page. The reason why that’s important is because if a link has a ton of backlinks, it becomes a lot harder to outrank them. And the reason why is because when you have a lot of backlinks or in other words, you have a lot of other sites linking to your resource, it signals to Google that your particular resource is more valuable than other resources on that same topic.

So, because we are able to identify a URL here that gets a ton of traffic on a monthly basis without any backlinks, we can quickly identify that this is a golden opportunity for us to create even better content and then get some backlinks to our page and subsequently outrank our competition.

I’m going to go ahead and do this process for the second article that I had selected as well. This is the one on how to deflate a soccer ball the right way. Again, I’m just going to use Ahrefs’ backlink checker, copy and paste that. I’m not a robot. Cause I’m speaking to you right now. Um, and then what I do here is I can see here is that the results here, there are actually eight backlinks to this URL.

So this would be a little bit harder for us to outrank. Not saying that it’s impossible though. It’s a low enough one that we could probably do some work here. And if anything, we could probably figure out of these other places that have been linking to this website. If we create a better resource, we can actually share our resource with them and maybe get a backlink from these sites that are already ranking to this particular site on soccerlifestyles.com.

To save us some time, I’m going to skip the third post that I had had opened in another tab since it’s pretty much the same process. The key takeaway though is if it has a high number of backlinks, it’ll be harder to steal the organic traffic. Whereas if they have no or low backlinks, then it’ll be super easy to outrank them.

If you’re following along with me right now, come on below so that I know. And let’s go ahead and jump into step number three.

Step #3: Analyze the content itself

The third thing we’re going to do is we’re going to actually analyze the content that we pulled up. When we do this, we’re going to want to think about things like what headers are being used? What’s the style of the piece or the tone of the writer? What are the call to actions in the post, if there are any? How good are the images or the graphics and visuals that are included in the post and anything else that is related to the quality of the overall piece.

What we want to figure out here is whether or not we feel like if we can make something even better than what already exists. So, let’s go ahead and jump in. As we look at this example on how long has halftime in soccer, I see that they have pretty good image in terms of the featured image for this post. They also have some general content here. But I’m honestly not that impressed by the depth of the content. And the reason why is because it’s really difficult for me as a reader to follow along with their flow because their headers are things like different halftime durations of games, but then it jumps into what happens at halftime and then cooling breaks half time and extra time, et cetera.

It doesn’t really flow in terms of giving the reader a beginning, middle, end as a story in terms of post itself. So, this could be a potential opportunity for us if we were to create that post. Another thing that I noticed is that this content is not all that dense. It’s probably a thousand words or a little over a thousand words.

And what that means to me is that there’s probably a lot of opportunities for me to create a post that answers every imaginable question on the planet when it comes to how long has halftime in soccer and create an even more informational post that will provide even more value to the reader.

The other thing that I noticed is that as I go down the page, there’s really only that one featured image to engage me with anything besides the text. And so, if I were to just read half the article, I might get bored and move on to the next resource.

All right, real quick. Let’s jump into the other example that we ran through the backlink checker. In this case, we’re going to look at how to deflate a soccer ball correct way. The first thing I noticed is that the title was not correctly formatted. It’s not grammatically correct. And so that’s already a ding in my book in terms of content quality. You can also notice that there are differences in terms of the headers and how they’re structured.

So the first one is why deflate a soccer ball, but then the next one is be careful which really shows no consistency in terms of the headers that are being used and what you’ll notice is that they also use different sizes of headers in a inconsistent way. So, you can see here that they’re probably using an H2, for deflating a soccer ball with a pump and needle. Uh, without a needle, final thoughts. So there’s inconsistencies here because all of their headers, except for the first two we’re  actually H2s.

So this just shows me that this person didn’t really create that great of content and yet they’re ranking very well for it. Something I do want to note here though, is that there is another image in the post, which is a little bit more engaging. And also when I hover over that image, you’ll notice that they actually put in the Alt text, which is a great SEO move in which they’re telling Google that this image is related to how to deflate a soccer ball content.

Step #4: Outline and create your content

The fourth step for us is to outline and create our content. As I’ve mentioned a few times throughout this article, the biggest thing here is to make sure that we are about to create the most epic piece of content, related to the topic at hand.

So, we want to fill every single imaginable gap, as well as answer the things that they’re already answering in our competitor’s pages and outline it to be so thorough that there could not possibly be any other question by the reader. This means answering who, what, where, when, why, and how super thoroughly for your reader.

I recommend that you outsource your writing if you want to scale fast. I’m going to have articles on how to do that in the future.

Step #5: Promote and interlink your content

The last step for us is to promote and interlink our content. Once we created our content, we need to actually get some eyeballs on it. So in order to do so, we’re going to create posts on Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever platform that your audience reads content on. If you have an email newsletter that can also be another great place for you to share the new content that you’re creating.

The other thing you’re going to want to keep in mind is how to get backlinks to your resource. Remember the more backlinks you have, the faster that you will be able to beat your competitor. One of the easiest tricks that I can give you here is to find opportunities in your own existing platforms to interlink between your posts.

What I’ve found in the past is that for every three or so internal links to my own resources, that’s pretty much the equivalent of one external backlink from another domain link into my site. Another big tip is don’t pay for any links. It’s really not worth the risk in terms of dealing with a search engine penalty, which might take you months to recover from.

Big Takeaways

Two big takeaways from today’s article:

  1. The first one to remember is that success leaves trails. What I mean by that is in many cases, regardless of whatever niche you’re in, you’re going to find that your competitors have already done something well. So, that can be a great time for you to take stock at what they’ve done well, what they haven’t done well, and try to find an opportunity to fill the gap.
  2. The second thing to remember is that planning makes executions super easy. I highly recommend that you try to batch as much of these steps as possible with one another. In other words, do all your research behind the pages all at one time, do all of your backlink checking all at one time, you’re outlining all at one time and your promotion all at one time. By doing so, you won’t stretch yourself too thin in terms of your bandwidth. And as a result, you’ll likely get even better results with this method.

If you found this article helpful, be sure to check out my YouTube channel to get new videos every single week I’ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you think might benefit from learning how to steal the organic traffic of their competitors.