Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I look for a way to get to know how much my competitors spend on text links monthly? Is there any way I can check that?
I need this to be able to set my own advertising budget.
thanks
Forget about what your competitors are spending- their situations may be completely different form your own. If they are making $100 million/year and you are making $1000/year, assume your budgets are completely different.
Plus, the software doesn't know how many link requests you sent out to get the number of links that you have. Again, competitor A may have sent out 1,000 link requests, yet only has that one paid link. Meanwhile, competitor B only sent out 100 link requests, yet has 50 links to his site.
No does it know if someone sends out e-mail link requests (basically no charge), snail mail letters ($.42/pop, or whatever a stamp costs these days, plus envelopes, etc.), phone call ($0.00 & up, depending on the phone plan), or some other method.
I'd say such a piece of software exists only in the mind of a science fiction writer. Or a scam artist- in which case the reports it spews out would be fiction in themselves.
Now, there is probably some software out there that tries to estimate a site's monthly spend on Google advertising. But that's a completely separate beast from link building.
[edited by: LifeinAsia at 5:10 pm (utc) on Mar. 16, 2009]
I beleive there is software to determine approximate total budget based on the analyis of incoming links and the factors of the pages that hold them. The numbers are approximate of course, but nonetheless provide an estimate.
That's about as good an estimate as you're going to get from any software package.
I just have to look at my site to know that there's nobody that has any idea externally how much I spend on links, or even if I spend any at all. Any estimate on my site would be ridiculous, and that's being generous.
In other words, any such data would be effectively worthless. Find some other way to figure out your own budget, that doesn't rely on what someone else is doing.
Why you care what others are spending is another question entirely. I know my competitors spend way more than I do (they buy links, I don't, so they clearly spend some non-zero number more than I do). Should I spend some money like they do? Or laugh at them? I choose the second.
Btw, $500 is exactly what one seo guy told me, using the somfware I mentioned. Lol.
I need to know how much i need to spend to rank in top5 results for my keyword.
I will simply drop it and turn to more time-consuming link development.
42 is the answer. I tell you.
Dennis, if it was me I wouldn't compare $500 of text link buys with my spending $500 of text link buys. I think it's very difficult to say that two $500 link buys will result in comparable rankings. I know my main competitor's SEO company (I know the owner), I know how they do SEO and if I took 5 minutes I bet I could pick the exact package they've got. And I still wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole. I don't want to have their profile.
If you're on a budget, save your $500 and read the libraries and FAQ's here and do the more time consuming link development. In my opinion I think that's likely to give you better results. Don't outthink Google, give them good quality links and let the pointyheads at Google figure out that they should rank you.
I appreciate you're taking the attitude of get the job done, but there may be less long term risk, better long term results and lower cost to taking the link building approach that you're trying to avoid. The tradeoff with what you're looking at, it pains me to say :) is shorter term gains and less short term risk.
I have around 300-600 old-school links from the first link campaign after launch (2004). Autumn 08 started to build more links: ordered link building (wish i hadnt) and got around 90 more, then 10 more (wish i hadnt agaig), plus the growing TLA budget is currently almost $400 (90 days passed for more than half of them), and no significant results (today went down from 3rd to 6th page in Google). Then I submitted manually to around 200 dirs, registered to blog catalogs and am now trying to exchange links with bloggers from BC.
So I wonder do i, along with social link development and directory submissions:
1. keep the $400 monthly ads and wait for results
2. keep current ans and adds more funds to increase monthly spendings
3. drop that paid link campaign and build natural links in the old-fashioned slow and time-consuming way
thanks
I've overcome my reluctance on trying things outside the bounds of pure white hat. But I do it on other sites, not my main one. So part of what I'm doing is 'what's working now', but just not on my corporate site.
Secondly, I'm intentionally going broad. More websites, targetting more secondary and long tail search terms. In addition to my main corporate website I'm trying to get 20,50,100 other websites all doing a trickle of business.
Thirdly I am working on a larger scale link bait/content program for my main corporate site. The intention is to continue to drive large, authority links to my site. The content will take months to put together, then a month or two or more of high quality link building. It'll probably be end of 2009 before I'm done it all. then however long after that to take effect.
But that may not be the right answer. As I said, I appreciate the conundrum here. And it's not even like things were before when you knew they would get whacked eventually - there seems to be no end in site for paid links being easy to get and easy to rank with.
btw: you could report competitor sites that are paying for links to manipulate ranking; if you do it though, you could get reported too;
just my 2 lincolns.
btw, I am now very actively promoting with social stuff, and it brings great results in terms of links that i get.. if only i had not bought those 400 worth monthly links, id love to report them all in the niche :)
I am now very actively promoting with social stuff, and it brings great results in terms of links that i get
some social sites drive major traffic, a lot of which has high bounce rates; after going for viral homeruns for some time, now i find i can convert better seeking out relevant forums and social sites that do not drive as much traffic but have higher conversion rates.
