Your Guide to Reverse Engineering Your Way to the Top of Google’s SERPs

So, you’ve taken the time to build a great-looking website and started filling it with landing pages and helpful content for your readers. But now what?

Well, for most people, the next priority is finding out how to successfully bring in high volumes of web traffic. You could go the easy (although less sustainable) route and start funding various paid advertising campaigns to help bring more attention to your website. However, this strategy will rarely have high returns on its own, considering how competitive and costly pay-per-click ads can be.

Instead of relying solely on paying for incoming web traffic, finding out how to get your website on top of Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) can be a much more cost-effective and long-term way of bringing in steady streams of relevant web users.

Still, getting to this point can take a lot of effort if you don’t know where to focus your priorities. This is where reverse engineering your competitor’s rankings can help you expedite the process.

What is Reverse Engineering in SEO?

The concept of “reverse engineering” something refers to taking something in its finished state and deconstructing it down to each element (or step) that was used to create it. You can think of it as the recipe book used to bake the cake.

When you think of reverse engineering in the context of SEO, the same principle can be applied when looking at your competitors “finished products.” These would be considered top rankings on search results pages, which can equate to a large amount of web traffic for certain keywords and phrases. The “recipe book” for these results can be made up of a wide range of ranking variables that they’re executing well.

The goal of reverse engineering in SEO is to better understand how your competitors are able to prove to Google that they belong in the top spot of these results pages. When this happens, you can start to apply the same tactics to your own strategies and potentially replicate their success.

But reverse engineering isn’t just about helping you create a carbon copy of another website. It can also help you to:

• Better understand the website structure Google is looking for.
• Identify the intent of a user’s search query and how it should be responded to.
• Know the level of authority or “trust factor” you’ll need to maintain in your niche.

Having all of this information accessible to you will make sure you’re not flying blind when starting to optimize your website. This can help you avoid prioritizing expense SEO tactics that may not necessarily be that important based on your ranking goals.

Using the Tools of the Trade

You might think that reverse engineering your competitor’s rankings requires a degree in digital marketing or website development and is a highly complex process. However, while it can take some time to get some deeper insights into the reasons behind certain rankings on search results pages, you might be surprised at how easy it can be.

Reverse engineering rankings results isn’t a new concept, and SEO professionals have using this tactic for decades. But now, there is an exhausting list of free and paid tools available to help you automate this process and help you get more from your efforts.

Paid SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs are considered two of the most popular solutions when it comes to analyzing all things related to keyword rankings and competitor analysis.

The great thing about these tools is they aren’t just designed to help you optimize your own website. A large part of their functionality is geared around helping individuals track their competitors while getting a detailed breakdown of how they’re achieving success on search engines.

There are also free tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics, which are what many website owners go to when it comes to evaluating their own website performance. While they may not be as comprehensive as some of the paid tools available today, they can be combined with other SEO solutions to help you create a holistic strategy for achieving great ranking results.

Step-by-Step Guide for Reverse Engineering Top Search Results

It can be a little intimidating once you start realizing the amount of variables that impact how Google decides to rank a website on search results pages. The important thing is to create a methodical approach you can follow when reverse engineering how your competitors do it. Below is a step-by-step guide to help you achieve this:

1. Finding a Good Starting Point

Before you start firing your start tracking down your competitors, it’s important for you to have some grounded understanding of the audience you’re trying to attract to your website and how they search for the products or services they need.

Here are some helpful tips to get you started:

1. Break Down Your Customer Personas – It’s important to have accurate demographic research in place regarding your potential customers. Knowing how they prefer to search for products online, where they go to find relevant information, and the general needs they have will help you fine-tune your approach.
2. Identify the Search Intent – You’ll want to put yourself in the searcher’s shoes. If you were researching your own niche as a consumer, how would you go about doing it? Would you need quick answers to questions so you can make a purchase, or would you need thorough research? Knowing the “intent” of user searches can be critical when creating content that speaks to that.
3. Organize Relevant Keywords – Once you’ve identified the search intent(s) for your audience, you can start to associate various keywords or phrases that speak to that. You’ll then want to organize this list so it can be refined.
4. Prioritize the Right Search Volumes – Not all keywords or phrases may be reasonable for you to try to rank for. It’s important to look for a balanced mix of low-hanging (low-competition) keywords with smaller search volumes and gradually prioritize higher-competition keywords over time.

2. Identify Your Top Competitors

The next step to take is identifying all of the competitors who rank for your targeted keywords. Although you could compile this list manually by conducting your own Google searches, it is much more efficient to use an SEO tool to help you automate the process of scraping these results.

It’s important to remember that rankings can change all of the time, especially considering Google’s March 2024 update. This update has quickly deindexed long-term ranking websites that haven’t been providing enough value for their users in the eyes of Google. Because rankings are dynamic, you’ll want to track these results regularly since new competitors may start popping up on the radar.

Using a tracking tool or your own spreadsheet, you’ll want to organize all of the competitors you find within the top 10 search results for your chosen keywords. You may no doubt find that many of your competitors are repeated across a wide range of your keywords in the same niche.

3. Evaluate Top Results Content

A big part of the success of most web pages that rank highly on Google’s SERPs is the content’s quality and relevance when addressing a user’s search intent. You’ll want to spend a fair amount of time diagnosing the content layouts of each of the top-ranking competitors to see if there are common denominators between them.

Some of the content variables you should look for include:

• The length of the content (word count)
• Content layout and structure used, including tables of contents, headings, etc.
• How many images they have on their pages
• Whether or not they make use of video on the webpage
• The type of search intent associated with the content (commercial, transactional, informational, or navigational)

While all of these variables may or may not be a primary ranking factor for the page, if you find there to be similarities between different high-ranking competitors, chances are it’s a variable you’ll want to focus on.

4. Examine Competitor Backlink Profiles

Although content formatting is important in SEO, your website’s trust factor is another important variable to consider. A website’s relative authority is closely associated with how many backlinks it attracts from other reputable sources. This often is a sign to Google that your website is safer to trust and will provide more value to users.

Knowing how many backlinks your competitors have and the domain authority of their websites is important to take note of. Even if you’ve chosen low-competition keywords and phrases, they still may be difficult to rank for if your main competitors have much higher authority than you do.

The other benefit of tracking your competitor’s backlink profiles is that it gives you some insight into where they’re receiving these “votes of confidence” from. Depending on your niche, you might be able to acquire the same type of backlink if you’re able to partner with the same or similar businesses that are willing to link back to your website.

5. Understand the Technical Performance of Your Competition

Over the years, Google has made it clear that it prioritizes websites that put effort into improving the user experience. Many times, this translates into ensuring optimal site performance. This includes how quickly it loads and making sure it’s responsive when being accessed on mobile devices.

Your website’s technical formatting can make a big difference in addressing website performance issues. Knowing how your competitors’ website performance stacks up against your own is another consideration you should make when trying to replicate their success.

The truth is that very few websites have perfect performance metrics across the board. This is especially the case as they add more pages of content and expand their structure. However, some metrics are more important than others when it comes to SEO.

By analyzing your competitors, you can quickly identify areas where your site might have a unique edge while also helping you ensure that you are meeting their benchmarks.

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Reverse engineering is a systematic and effective way to help you stay on track when knowing where you should invest your time and resources to rank your content higher in search engines. However, it can be really easy to get yourself going down an optimization rabbit hole that doesn’t provide any tangible results.

Below are some of the common pitfalls you might come across when reverse engineering search results and how to avoid them.

Focusing on One Type of Variable

There are literally hundreds of variables that impact the way Google ranks websites in their SERPs. While it’s probably not reasonable to work toward improving all of them, you also don’t want to get into the habit of putting all your eggs in one basket.

It’s better to focus your optimization efforts across three or four variables at a time – content quality, keyword optimization, technical SEO, and your backlink profile.

Creating a Carbon Copy Website

Thinking you can copy everything your competitors do is a mistake. Closely mimicking their content layouts or copying blocks of text word for word will get your content flagged as plagiarism and will come across as not being unique enough for users.

Google highly values websites that provide expertise in their niche and speak to that differently than others do. While you can definitely mirror certain tactics, you should be very careful with how you execute your changes and take your own approach to meeting similar ranking benchmarks.

Working With Outdated Information

As mentioned before, search rankings are highly dynamic and change all of the time. Because of this, you need to be careful that the tools you’re using are giving you accurate, up-to-date information.

Some tools only crawl search engines once a month. Other SEO tools may only crawl results pages only 2-3 months. This can be problematic if you’re relying on information that a major Google algorithm update could deeply impact. Instead, you may want to invest in a paid SEO solution that can provide you with either real-time or on-demand updates.

Being Impatient

It can be really hard to stay patient when wanting to see your web traffic climb. However, SEO is a long game. Very rarely can you make changes to your website and expect to see results within a couple of days or even a couple of months.

So long as you’re following best SEO practices and working toward getting your benchmarks closer to your competitors, results will come in time.

Start Ranking Your Website Higher

Reverse engineering your competitors’ search rankings can be a great way to help you prioritize your own SEO initiatives. By following this guide and staying patient with the results, you’ll be able to see similar ranking results with your own website and watch the traffic roll in.

Author: Jason Khoo

This article is written by Jason Khoo. Jason started freelancing in SEO in college, sold his first agency, and now is the founder of Zupo, an Orange County-based SEO consulting agency helping construct powerful long-term SEO strategies for our clients. Jason also enjoys multiple cups of tea daily, hiding away on weekends, catching up on reading, and rewatching The Simpsons for the 20th time.