Keyword research - how to find additional competitors and links

[BobGW]

Hello,

We need 100 strong  linking root domains to rank at all in our industry (probably more). But all our competitors are using internal pages.

I only found one competitor that is using their home page, and I found 12 good backlink possibilities through it.

How do I go about finding other competitors? I know this is a general question, but what strategies do you guys use, and could you give examples?

[goodlegaladvice]

why wouldn't you be using internal pages as well only have to build 1 page authority unless you have 100 people that can each work with an individual domain and get it authoritative

I just google search the term I want to rank for than see who comes up than through them into places like ose and see what they are doing & if I can beat them

[BobGW]

So even if there's hundreds of people building one big page authority in my industry, I could target my internal pages towards niches that are smaller or different than my competitors and do well?

That seems to be what everyone else is doing in our competitive niche. Is there a way to do this when it's pretty competitive?

[goodlegaladvice]

search "asbestos attorney"  A very competitive term that I have not yet tried to target (over $100per click in adwords)

The First 3 are big sites (aka:sokolove) than it goes to domain targeted sites.  Sokolove Targets some 300 or more keywords and his domain alone helps outrank most of his comp

as well a not so comp keyword "pradaxa lawyer" that we just started targeting by just creating a page without much seo gets #5 rank

I can see creating a domain for 1 keyword in an area a seoing it crazy and getting it in the top 3 but doing that 100 times seems like years of work...  if you could get it to rank in a month

[BobGW]

Oh I see. You misinterpreted my question

We need 100 strong backlinks for our site to rank at all in our industry (probably more). But all our competitors are using internal pages so they don't have much to sort through in OSE.

[RuthBurrReedy]

At the most basic level, your competitors for any given keyword are the sites that rank for that keyword - but if you Google not only your keyword, but also related keywords (not just SEO but SEO services, SEO consulting, etc.) you will start to see a few sites that come up for a variety of semantically related searches.  I'd start by mining their backlinks.

There are lots of ways to find link targets beyond mining your competitors' backlinks, though. Try searching "(your keyword) blog" to find relevant blogs on your topic/in your industry.  Use a service like FriendOrFollow to look at your competitors' followers and the people they follow on Twitter - some of them will have useful sites as well.  Once you find a site that you'd like to target for a link, look at that site's backlinks to find more related sites to target.

Don't forget that you can use the "pages on this root domain" option in Open Site Explorer and pull out all of the links to a domain, whether to the home page or internal pages.

[goodlegaladvice]

yeah i prob should have read the title.........................  Can I ask what industry cause in the lawyer sector There is 100+ article/blog sites 100+  LOCAL directory sites 100+ Other Related Sites

a good place to get some backlinks is patch they use sub domains for each town so every area you market to you get a listing (and i think there blogs have follow links)