Hi again, folks. It's time for Part 3 of B2B SEO Strategy. Last time, we were doing some competition analysis. When we left off, I'd shown you how to quickly gauge the number of indexed pages that have been optimized for a particular keyword. This is a good way to get a rough idea how many SEO's are targeting the keyword, and how hard it might be to rank for the keyword. The keyword in question, "buy caviar," turned out to be low competition. The next thing we're going to look at is the off-page competition. And what I mean by that is, roughly how much link building would it take to rank for a particular keyword. For this next part, you need a backlink checker like AHREFS, Majestic SEO, or Moz's Open Site Explorer. I'm a fan of AHREFS myself, so that's what I'm going to be using. First things first, let's see what's ranking for our search term. We're going to take the top 5 results and analyze their backlink profiles. Make sure you're signed out of your Google account before you do your search, or your results will be tailored to you. Googling "buy caviar online" gives us the following URL's in the top 5:
- www.caviarlover.com
- www.caviarexpress.com
- www.igourmet.com/caviar.asp
- www.zabars.com/caviar/Caviar,default,sc.html
- www.blackstargourmet.com/Caviar_c_1.html
Now, in terms of backlinks, we really need to look at two things here: the number of links pointing to these particular URL's, and the number of links pointing to their domains as a whole. For the first two results, those two things are one and the same. For the last three, they're going to be different. I threw these into a batch analysis in AHREFs, and here's what I got:
| URL |
Total Backlinks |
| www.caviarlover.com |
14877 |
| www.caviarexpress.com |
130 |
| www.igourmet.com/caviar.asp |
2 |
| www.zabars.com/caviar/Caviar,default,sc.html |
7 |
| www.blackstargourmet.com/Caviar_c_1.html |
25 |
The only page that looks really tough to beat from a link-building standpoint is www.caviarlover.com with almost 15k links. However, further investigation reveals that these links are coming in from only 33 different domains. In other words, they have 15k links coming in from around 30 sites, which is not something we need to be terribly afraid of. Let's take a look, though, at how the root domains compare. Another batch analysis in AHREFS gives us the following:
| URL |
Total Linking Domains |
Total Backlinks |
| www.caviarlover.com |
33 |
14874 |
| www.caviarexpress.com |
55 |
130 |
| www.igourmet.com |
2495 |
24288 |
| www.zabars.com |
1840 |
22510 |
| www.blackstargourmet.com |
88 |
348 |
So we can see above that igourmet.com and zabars.com are very powerful domains, with thousands of distinct domains linking back to them and tens of thousands of different links. But neither domain is focusing all their power on linking for caviar like caviarlover.com or caviarexpress.com, so it's certainly possible to outrank them. (There are more sophisticated ways to find out how much PR from the root domain is being funneled to the ranking URL, but I won't get into that here). blackstargourmet.com, however, is a relative newcomer, with only 88 domains and 348 links total, it's on the frontpage at number 5. They could be ousted from that position with a moderately aggressive link-building campaign. So in terms of off-page, or in other words link-building, it looks like "buy caviar online" is a low competition keyword. What do I mean by link-building, exactly? And how does one go about that? Stay tuned for Part 4.
