Free Overlooked Google hacks let you keep an eye on competitors and ethically steal their webinar traffic

When you’re ready to launch your webinars, it helps to know where to look for registrants. Checking out strategies your competitors use is a great idea—if you can track their success, you can use the knowledge you gain to generate your own.

You can use Google to hack into your competitor’s strategies in a few ways:

1. Spying on their content and how they get traffic gives you a feel for what draws registrants to their webinar landing pages
2. Searching for specific URLs can also reveal what your competitors are up to
3. And so can searching for images through Google and Pinterest

I’m going to show you how to use these three types of free Google hacks now to help you prepare your own webinar marketing strategies.

The first thing you’ll need to do is make a list of your top competitors. Rank them in order. List the ones you think are doing a good job marketing themselves at the top. These will be the companies you look into first.

Spy on your competitor’s content strategy

There are a couple of ways you can discover topics that draw registrants to your competitor’s webinars. You can use free tools to compare information, and you can look into your competitor’s backlinks.

Use spy tools to compare marketing elements

Once you have your list, pick the top three most successful marketers. You’ll use the following tools to find the AdWords, SEO and content strategy for these companies.

• Spyfu
• Similarweb
• Semrush

Compare the AdWords and SEO data that you find. If you can see a common topic that your top competitors are all using, that’s most likely a good target for your webinar advertising, too.

(Note: If you want to use the free version of these tools, I recommend using all three. Sometimes one tool picks up data that others miss.)

How to find information from a competitor’s backlinks

To see whether your competitors use a specific content strategy for getting webinar registrants, type one of your competitor’s URL in Google’s URL search bar. On the next page that pulls up, you’ll see a ‘Backlinks’ tab on the top or left sidebar.

Click on the ‘Backlinks’ tab to pull up a list of your competitor’s backlinks. You’ll be able to see the kind of types of websites linking back to the webinar registration pages. We’ll use Redfins, a real estate company, as an example.

Here is an example of Redfins backlinking/content strategy:

What content topics do these backlinks center on? If there’s a common thread, it’s probably worth targeting similar websites when you promote your own webinar.

From the sites listed on this page, I can see that Redfins gets 391 new website clicks a month. The next step is to investigate exactly where the traffic is coming from. For this step, we’ll be looking at websites that drive at least 20 clicks per month to the Redfins website.

Here are three of them:

Site #1: Atlanta Blues Society

Take a look at the Atlanta Blues Society website below:

Although I don’t see Redfins written anywhere on the website, I see this website does a lot of paid advertising. It’s a good bet that this is how Redfins gets its traffic from this site. (Always check for banner and display ads, especially if you’re not sure whether there’s a clear content connection.)

Site #2: Merrens.com

This website drives 61 new clicks to the Redfins website every month. Redfins is integrated into the site’s content list, so I know this is a content marketing strategy.

Site #3: blog.franklyrealty.com

Here’s another example of how Redfins is leveraging content marketing. This website is driving 41 new clicks to the Redfins website each month.

As you navigate through these pages, check for banner ads and other promotions. Display advertising can be a big source of traffic for these sites. If you don’t see a lot of paid advertising, are your competitors’ webinar pages linked to from the content?

How much of the backlinks come from paid advertising and how much comes from backlinks in content? If you can figure this out, you can decide how much effort to put into getting content backlinks and how much money to invest in paid advertising on similar sites.

Try this fun Google webinar URL search hack

Next we’ll see how easy it is to find your competitor’s webinars with a simple Google search. Normally finding competitor’s webinars involves jumping through all sorts of hoops but I am going to show you a quick hack where you can find your competitors webinars in seconds.

This is important because the more easily you can find your competitor’s websites, the more time you have to investigate how they’re getting webinar registrants—and how to duplicate their success.

What kind of webinar are you looking for?

Some webinars are live, and some are automated. Before you start searching, determine whether you are looking for a live or automated webinar.

If you’re looking for an automated webinar, JetWebinar is your best bet. Before JetWebinar came along, good automated webinar software was almost impossible to come by. (If you’re looking for a 2-in-1 marketing and sales-focused webinar software, you can sign up for a free JetWebinar trial here.)

For live webinars, the leading software is Gotowebinar.

Quick Steps for finding competitor’s webinars

You can use this formula for any of your competitors regardless of the software they are using. Because you will have the most luck with Gotowebinar, let’s start with them.

Open up Google search. Then copy and paste this link below in the URL bar:

http://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register

 

The registration URL is a part of all Gotowebinar links for getting webinar registrants. This is no different than any other webinar software, and this is what allows the hack to work.

Let’s walk through an example so you can see exactly what to do.

Pretend you’re real estate investor and who wants to see how your competitors are using webinars to close more business or attract clients.

Step 1: Copy the link http://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register

Type real estate investing after it—so your Google search should look like this:

Do this search in the ‘All’ search and in the ‘Videos’ search.

You will be given tons of webinar links and registration pages to navigate through. Browse through them. See which ones are the most successful and what conclusions you can draw from them about how to run your own webinar marketing strategy.

Now that you can find competitor’s webinars quickly, you’ll have more time to do the marketing research. You’re welcome.

Another way to quickly find competitor’s webinars using Google or Pinterest Images

Like the webinar URL registration hack, using Google image search can make finding competitor’s webinars a breeze. Once you’ve found them, you can follow the steps found here to hack how they set up their email marketing funnel.

You can also use the information you find to see which webinars are the most successful. Investigating the backlinks and content for these webinar pages can help you determine where to put your best efforts when it comes time to market your own webinars.

Using image searches on Google to find competitor’s webinars

Step 1: Go to Google Images

Step 2: Type in the type of webinar you’re looking for (such as ‘real estate investing webinar,’ etc.). Make sure to include the word ‘webinar’ in your search. When you hit enter, Google will pull up images associated with the types of webinars you’re looking for.

Step 3: Navigate and through the images to find webinars for specific company’s you’re looking for or images for webinars that look particularly interesting.

Step 4: Click on the image links that interest you most. When you do, you’ll be brought straight to their webinar registration page, where you can start gleaning useful information.

The process should look something like this:

Steps 1 and 2—finding the images on Google Images

Steps 3 & 4—clicking on an image that interests you

For this example, I clicked on the first image I saw. I was immediately directed to one of this competitor’s webinar landing pages:

From this page, you can register for an automated webinar from this competitor and see how they handle their e-mail funnel.

If this is a landing page for a competitor you didn’t know about before, you can find the main website for this company. Then you can look into their content, backlinks, and AdWords strategies.

Using Images from Pinterest to find competitor’s webinars

The process for finding webinars from Pinterest images is almost identical to how you find them on Google Images.

Step 1: Log into Pinterest

Step 2: Search the keywords that apply to the types of webinars you’re looking for (real estate investing webinars, etc.)

Step 3: Click on the images and navigate to your competitor’s webinar landing pages.

It should look like this:

As with Google Images, every picture that pulls up is focused on a webinar. Clicking on the linked images will direct you to a webinar registration page.

For this example, I’m going to click on the image on the top left-hand corner that is listed by Home Buyer Post LLC. The linked image brings me to the following page:

From here, you can register directly for the webinar and start other forms of webinar marketing research. Repeat the process as many times as you need to or want to in order to find a number of webinars from your competitors.

Conclusion

One particular advantage for finding your competitor’s webinars fast is the more webinars you see, the more you’ll be able to notice webinar marketing trends. Basically, you’ll be able to see what works for your most successful competitors.

You’ll also have more time to delve into their backlinks and content and see exactly how they’re driving traffic to their webinar registration pages. When you know how they’re creating webinar marketing success, you can do it, too.