Jane Copland, from Ayima, came on after the first break. Her presentation largely revolved around doing competitive analysis when link building.

According to her, competitive analysis should not be about copying the backlink profile of your competitors. Rather, it should be more of a holistic market overview.

One of the more interesting things she recommended was to start tracking the ranking positions of your competitors for the keywords you’re targeting, and not just those ahead of you, those behind you as well. If you start to see large spikes in movement, then you know they are link building and you can begin to keep an eye on them and track where they’re getting their links from. This is especially true if they begin ranking for semi-competitive KWs.

*Want an easy way to do this? Well if you’re using Raven Tools already (highly recommended for large scale link building campaigns), then you can add competitors into your SERP tracking.

 

Things to keep an eye out for:

1. More than the total number of links to a competitor, pay attention to the number of C-Class IP addresses.
2. Relationship Links: You can’t copy relationship links your competitor is getting.
3. Look for existing offline relationships. Are you a cleaning business? Do you do cleaning for an office of an insurance company? Get that link!
4. Forget about filing spam reports to Google. It is a waste of time as Google receives numerous complaints and would rather clean up their SERPs algorithmically than making manual adjustments. Instead, blog about it as it will likely be more profitable.

Jane was kind enough to provide 2 great resources to find good quality directories to submit to:

http://Searchenginejournal.com/web-directories

http://Seomoz.org/directories

Also, if you’re looking to spend money on a directory submission, Jane recommended going after some less known directories and spending up to $100 vs. the annual $300 fee at a directory like Yahoo.

Lastly, if your competitor is using a wide link network to game Google, know what you’re up against, understand the metrics, and compete with them by getting the same metrics, not using the same tactics!