When you do market research for any new business venture or an addition to your current business venture, one way to truly understand your market is to study your competitors. If they are doing anything similar to what you want to do, find out how they’re doing it, when they’re doing it and what their results are from doing it. This includes the concept of linkable assets.
Just as you need linkable assets, your competitors do too. Likely they have them. During your market research (part of which includes studying your competition), take the time to discover what linkable assets they have, how they are marketing them, who is linking to them, and why they are linking to them.
Use Link Checking Tools
Using a tool like ahrefs.com to explore any site is a great way to determine and discover your competitors’ linkable assets. This tool, which has free and paid accounts, is very useful not only to research competitors but also to help you improve your own linking structure and linkable assets.
Naturally, you’ll get more for your efforts if you sign up for a paid account. Then you can look at top pages for any given domain to find the referring domains to those most important linkable assets. You can also use this tool to search for anchor text so that you can discover patterns. Something that is very valuable will show up over and over again.
Search Social Media Sharing
You can also use social media as a tool to research a particular asset’s popularity in terms of social sharing. The best way to accomplish this is to use a tool like Ahrefs.com in conjunction with a spreadsheet so that you can drill down more on the data that is given. Set up some Google Alerts, and find out where your competition lives on social media outside of their own websites. Follow them, friend them, and be part of their inner circle to learn more.
Learn Advanced Search Query Terms
You can use Google for so much if you only know how to use it to conduct advanced search. You can search all kinds of things on any given domain name if you know how to set up the search. To search a competitor’s site for something specific, enter into Google Search tool bar the following: site:thesiteyouwanttosearch.com “term you want to search”. It’s that simple. You could search for PDFs, PowerPoints, videos, and more using this method.
Another tool you should most definitely be made aware of is something called Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool. You will need to install it on your computer, but you can use it for so many things – including studying your competitors’ linkable assets. The link is http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
You can analyze any site to ensure that SEO is at its best, and one aspect of good SEO is having linkable assets. You can use a free version and an upgraded licensed version. It’s very powerful and useful and will crawl whatever site you enter into, giving you information that you need to improve or compete. You can read the extensive user guide here: http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/user-guide/
