Everyone overlooks things now and then. If you’re running a business, it’s impossible to cover all areas. No matter how much you try, on occasion your site may let slip a broken link or outdated information. Just as you have your slip-ups, your competitors will too. This is something a smart site owner can take advantage of.
Of course, most businesses do their best to prevent such things from happening on their site. On the most part, your competitors will be as watchful of mistakes as you are. There will be times when a competitor slips up, and these are times that with watchfulness should be of benefit to your site.
Here are some of the ways you can pick up where your competitors fall down:
*Explore broken links pages: The content of any site can be a valuable source of links. A lot of sites link through to the high-quality SEO content on business sites because they provide good information for their readers. As every site owner knows, pages do sometimes go astray and links get broken. When this happens, you can be there to pick up the slack.
You can find some instances of this when researching pages that list reader resources. These occur every so often for most industries, when bloggers decide to provide their readers with an easy list of good resources for their topic. Simply search for lists in your industry in Google, go to the top resource pages, and click on the links provided. There will invariably be one or two pages for which the link is broken, providing you with a great opportunity to approach the list writer with a suggestion for a link to your high-quality content.
It’s important to approach the right kind of sites for these links. As with any link, check out the credentials of the site providing the links before you approach them. If the list appeared at the top of your search, the site is likely to be a good source. Talk to our consultants at www.seoconsult.co.uk about links and how they affect your search engine optimisation.
*Cover outdated content: Information goes out of date on the net at a lightning pace, and when providing constant content for search engine optimisation it can be difficult to keep up with changes. Your competitors will occasionally leave outdated information on their pages. When this happens, it’s a good idea to cover this topic on your site, and to point out that the information is new.
Again, this kind of information is best found by starting with list-type articles. Search for ‘top links for [subject]’ and have a quick browse through the articles others recommend.
*Scour comments for complaints: One of the better things about comments sections is that everything is public. Although editing comments and dealing with customer complaints in private is a good idea, not every site does so. The comments sections of competing sites, queries in industry forums, and general industry chat can give you some good pointers on how to outperform your competitors and can be great search engine optimization tools to help you stand out from the crowd.