They say, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” Now, consider this phrase in the context of your online business. Your business might have a long list of helpful “friends” and topping this list would most probably be dear, old SEO. What about the enemies? No points for guessing this, but they are, of course, your competitors! But remember that these negative elements not only give you a run for your money, but also keep you striving for more success and stay ahead in the rat-race. Everyone does enough by just loathing their competitors, but the wiser, and the more successful usually go a step ahead; they “use” their competitors to help them in their work. Confused? Think about “competitive intelligence”.

In the SEO world, competitive intelligence (CI) generally relates to the process of researching by gathering useful data about your rival websites and then analyzing and applying that information to figure out the methods used by your rivals and device your own website optimization strategies using them. CI’s main focus is on the business environment external to your own business. Researching your competitors not only enables you to find out what your competitors are doing, but it will also inform you about how you match up to them, as well as predict their future business moves. This will help you in tweaking your link campaigns and preparing your future SEO strategies well in advance.

To get started, first you need to find out who your competitors are actually. While you might consider your direct competitors as the ones who sell similar goods as you, don’t make the mistake of ignoring the sites who are ranking well for your keyword phrases, even if they are just informational websites. You can use Competitive Research tools like Alexa and compete.com to see the traffic trends for competing websites. Google Search Insights is another great tool for tracking keyword trends and it also shows you top geographic regions for a particular keyword and top keywords by category. To take advantage of your competitors’ weaknesses you would also need to find out additional information, like the third-party companies being used by you competitors and if they are using any analytics package or content management system, to incorporate these practices into your own system. You can find out all this information by following the clues left behind by your rivals in the source code of their web pages.

Competitive link analysis is another great tool to do half the work and gain twice the amount out of it. We all know the importance of acquiring quality inbound links for getting more traffic, so we use numerous link building strategies for doing so. Now, try analyzing your competitors’ backlinks to gain backlinks from the same websites that are linking to them. In fact, you can even make your competitors lose their backlinks from a website and make that website backlink to you instead. But make sure that these tactics make up just a small part of your campaign and you don’t bias against a single competitor while replacing backlinks, as these might make search engines susp