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5 Ways to Steal Your Competitor's Web Traffic Driving consumers to your website will increase online traffic and increase competitiveness in the marketplace.

By Ian Cleary Edited by Dan Bova

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Do you ever wonder why your competitor attracts a lot of traffic and you don't get as much?

How would you like to steal some of your competitor's traffic?

Here are five ways:

1.Target their keywords.

If you go to SEMRush and type in your competitor's name, you'll see a list of the top 10 keywords that your competitor ranks for.

SEMRush will show you the keywords, the estimated number of searches for these keywords and the page that gets the traffic. This is really valuable information when you want to take some of that traffic for yourself.

Related: 17 Ways To Immediately Improve Your Website Traffic

Pick out the most relevant keywords and create content that targets the keywords that have a reasonable amount of traffic. Make sure you create better content than your competitor, focusing on high quality and providing great value to your readers. Always promote that content aggressively. There's no point writing amazing blog posts if nobody knows they've been published.

2. Increase your domain authority.

A company called Moz crawls the Web to collect information related to websites to work out their Domain Authority. This is based on a variety of factors that are important to Google for ranking content. The Domain Authority score ranges from zero to 100 and the higher the authority, the easier it is to get targeted traffic.

You should aim for as high a Domain Authority score as possible, so start to take action to increase it. The first part of increasing your Domain Authority is to know what your score is, and what your competitor's is, too. You can find this out by downloading the free Moz Toolbar.

One of the best ways of increasing authority is to get high-quality links, which leads nicely onto the next point.

Related: Make Your Website a Daily Destination

3. Take some of the high-quality links from your competitor.

In a report by Brian Deane from Backlinko on how Google ranks content, getting high-quality links from other websites is still extremely important for search engine rankings.Use an SEO tool such as ahrefs to find companies that are linking to content on your competitor's site and, if you have higher quality content, then reach out to these sites and request that they link to you instead. If you don't currently have higher quality content, then create it.

4. Become more influential.

When you create higher quality content it's much easier to get attention to this content.

But if you are influential within your industry you are more likely to get your content noticed even without promotion. One way of becoming a key influencer is producing content that demonstrates you as a thought leader. You also need to build relationships with key influencers within your industry.Influence leads to traffic diverting from your competitor to you.

Related: The 6 Best Ways to Build Website Traffic

5. Use paid promotion tactics.

As organic reach drops on social media sites like Facebook, using paid ads is becoming more important to reach your existing fans and potential new fans.

On Facebook, you can target your ads based on lots of demographic characteristics, including age, location, and interests. If your competitor is large enough it may be listed as an interest, so you can target people based on this, to reach people in your niche who haven't heard about you yet.

The online world is a very competitive environment so we need to be competitive. Try some of these tactics and your traffic will increase.

Ian Cleary

Marketing Technologist, Founder of Razorsocial

Ian Cleary is founder of RazorSocial who provide online training on content marketing and social media to marketers and business owners.  Ian is considered one of the world's lead social media specialists and speaks regularly at international conferences around the world.

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