Of all the secretly schadenfreude type of content we’ve shared with you our dear fellow SEO friends, this is probably one of the juiciest ones.
Though on a serious note, the purpose of this afternoon’s topic is not to laugh at the enemy, but rather to be aware of some of the dangerous signs they are willing to do and go to just to get back at you if in case you’re already winning the race up the first page.
In the realm of search engine optimization, once you get the hang of actually taking care of your site, one of the most certain things that could occur is that your once-confident-and-powerful competitors can be tempted to go the desperate route. Cheating your way out of a competition isn’t something new. Especially in SEO.
Let’s be honest. You can preach all those white hat stuff till you run out of breath, but business is business. And when you have a deadline or a KPI you need to reach, anything will happen after office hours.
These days, anything goes. So checking on your competitors doesn’t make you an insane paranoid person. Speaking of insane people, the first thing you might see is:
A Change in Behavioural Pattern
It’s easy to see these things even on the surface. Plus this gives importance to that saying “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Add your competitors on Facebook. Follow them on Twitter and on Instagram.
In these places you can view how they are coping with things happening all around them. No matter how contained you might think you are, sooner or later you’ll vent out your feelings on social media.
Once your competitor shares a Beatles song like “Yesterday”, you know there’s something wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haWRUpPw_tI
Ok, let’s get lower down the levels of hell. I mean panic. Another thing you can look for is.
A Change In the Way They Do Their Business
In a sense, this can give them the edge. If they suddenly try to improve their business process, if they suddenly go crazy doing ads on Adwords, if they’re clamouring to get more and more customers, it’s an obvious clue that they are trying to catch up to someone else’s performance.
Do take note by the way that it doesn’t mean they’ll suddenly be able to save themselves immediately. If they suddenly take in more people that demand service or products and they’re not ready for it, they will for sure run into a lot of mistakes and trouble trying to give out more that they can pour out.
Going deeper, you might get to notice all those other little things that businesses do when panicking.
A Sudden Increase In Their Activity
Trying to produce things for the web almost every day is no simple feat. In YouTube for example, people that post vlogs almost daily devote themselves entirely to doing their best to get to post these videos every single day. On writing blogs, big sites like Moz or Search Engine Journal can do this with ease. If you’ve adopted this style already, that’s good. But if you then see your competitors starting to follow your style, you know something’s up.
Anybody out there out on the web is capable of producing content daily. You just need to have access to the net and the knowhow to write. Honestly you can just take any content, spin it and there you go. Let’s see though how long you’d last.
But there is a very particular reaction to this, though, that if you have the eye for these things, you can see it at first glance.
Splitting Blog Topics
If you’ve either been writing or reading all these articles for a really long time, you’ll be able to see these things so fast, you’ll just be amazed at how desperate …I mean, diabolical your competitors can be.
In creating articles for your site, you can actually split topics and make a series of posts. It can have a really good effect for the audience. You can keep them engaged and entertained. And we’ve done that a couple of times:
But the thing you should be looking for is when you see something like:
What You Should Check on a Website as an SEO
Most Important Items to Check the Health of Your Campaign
On Site SEO: Important Tips For Your Own Agency
Website Audit Hacks 2018
SEO Audit Guide for Singapore Marketers
We get it, man. And though it is okay to split topics, doing it more than twice is a really bad move.
Did you all know that there was a “Kill Bill Vol.3”? No? Yeah. Neither did I.
The point here is that overdoing things can lead to you having an opening your competitor can strike on. And on this instance, it’s the fact that they’re obviously trying to stretch a topic so they can get through a week’s worth of blog posting.
Lastly, it’s something that we’ve discussed a number of times.
Negative SEO
Always be careful of your competitors. Any one of them can have the budget to hire people that can strike you from the side. Employing negative SEO sounds like cheating, and it is. But, like I said. In business, anything can happen.
