Your competitor backlinks can be your ultimate source for finding reliable backlink sources to create a healthy backlink profile that can help you rank higher in Google. The best part about competitor analysis is that your competitors are in your niche, and they are more likely to have loads of backlinks from other niche-relevant sites. After performing competitor backlink analysis, you can pitch your guest post and link insertion to the sites they linked to, as it is all about finding great link-building opportunities. Rest assured, your competitor backlinks will help you rank higher in Google results.
Competitor Backlinks – What Are They
Competitor backlinks are backlinks that point from other websites to your competitor’s websites. Analyzing competitor backlinks can help you effectively analyze their link building strategies and also identify potential link-building opportunities for your own website’s SEO efforts. Competitor backlinks, also referred to as competitor link analysis, involve effectively researching and analyzing the backlink profiles of niche-relevant competitor websites.
Competitor backlinks analysis is beneficial for you because they are already within your niche, and they are likely to have loads of niche-relevant backlinks. Now, when it comes to backlinks, you should know that Google sees backlinks as endorsements of the value and authority of your content, which makes backlinks a crucial website ranking factor in search engine algorithms.
Competitor Backlinks – Why They Matter
Now that you know what competitor backlinks are, let us explore why they matter for your backlink profile or overall website health.
Help You Gain A Competitive Edge
Analyzing your competitor’s backlinks will help you gain a competitive edge, which means that you will have someone else do the homework for you. New websites find it challenging to build backlinks, primarily because they don’t know where and how to start. New businesses know they need backlinks from niche-relevant sites, but they might find it challenging to know where to start – let alone pitch guest posts and draft outreach emails.
Nonetheless, things will start to get easier once you start analyzing your competitor’s backlink profile.
Help You Tailor Your Outreach Strategies
With the use of backlink analysis tools, such as Ahrefs, you can assess the metrics of the competitor’s backlinks. Understandably, you would like to score similar links to improve the ranking power of your own website. After performing some detective work on your competitor’s backlink profile, you will be able to establish a more compelling pitch while reaching out to bloggers.
Using your competitor’s backlink profile to your advantage, you can reach out to the respective bloggers with a personalized email and request them to link to your content or products.
Help You Discover Backlink Gaps
When your competitor’s websites have more backlinks than your website, it is referred to as a backlink gap. As you already know, backlinks exhibit credibility votes in the eyes of Google, which makes backlinks a crucial ranking factor. So, if your competitors will have more backlinks pointing to their websites, it will be challenging for you to outrank your competitors.
Your best bet is to close the backlink gap by creating at least as many or more backlinks than your competitors. However, you must perform a competitor’s backlink analysis first so that you know where the gap exists. Rest assured, by monitoring your competitors’ backlink profiles; you will know the exact number of backlinks your competitors have in comparison to your website, which in turn will help you identify any gaps.
Help You Replicate Successful Strategies
Last but not least, a competitor backlink analysis will help you learn from the best in the industry. That said, by analyzing your successful competitors, you can replicate their strategies and build high-quality backlinks that can help you climb higher in Google. For instance, if your strongest competitors in the industry have a backlink profile that comprises guest posts on high-quality and authoritative sites, you will know that they built authority with high quality guest posts.
Subsequently, you can replicate their strategy to yield effective results for your own website. The best part is that there is no law that prevents you from replicating the same tactics as your competitors, which means that no one can stop you from replicating.
How to Find Competitor Backlinks
As you already know the importance of competitor analysis, you know that this process requires you to assess how your competitors are optimizing their content and websites for SEO purposes. Competitor analysis is an effective method to discover who your competitors are for specific keywords as well as the potential gaps in your competitor’s content that you can fill.
Perform Keyword Research
The first step to finding competitor backlinks is to identify keywords with keyword research. Starting with one keyword, you can add more keywords and phrases to your keyword list. While we recommend using somewhat between 25 to 50 keywords for your SEO activity, you are all good if you can find the one most important keyword to use for competitor analysis.
The underlying reason is that if you have too many keywords, you will potentially end up with a massive list of competitors, which will be realistically too long to get through.
Discover Your Primary Competitors
Once you have created a list of the SEO keywords that you are targeting, your next step is to identify your primary competitors. You might want to use a basic Google search as the starting point for identifying your primary competitors. However, you might want to avoid the use of plain keywords in your search, as it will result in personalized results.
To get accurate results, you must try composing a search string to get a list of related sites. You can also use SEMrush to perform an in-depth analysis. You can run your domain through the SEMrush tool to get a list of your top competitors. You will also get to review the traffic trends of your competitors along with the following aspects:
- Top shared keywords
- Traffic sources
- Growth history
- Target audience demographics
Depending on the tool that you are using to discover your competitors, you can get a comprehensive report of your website backlink profile from where you can also view the primary backlink competitors. Your top competitors will have the highest number of shared referral backlinks with your website.
Categorize Your Competitors
Once you have the list of your competitors, you must categorize them as you don’t want to get the different types of competitors mixed up. You should know that not everyone on the list of your organic search competitors is industry-related. So, you must categorize your competitors so that you can analyze their backlinks differently.
When it comes to categorizing your competitors, you must assess what each website specializes in and use the results to form the following two categories:
Domain-level competitors: These are your main competitors as they specialize in the same industry and also target the same keywords. These competitors compete with your website across all levels, which is why you must perform a backlink analysis on all their web pages.
Page-level competitors: These competitors exist as single URLs, and their websites aren’t your direct competitors. As a matter of fact, they aren’t even in the same niche, which is why the competition exists only in individual web pages that are ranking for the same keywords as yours. This aspect indicates why you are only reviewing the individual ranking web page.
Use A Competitor Analysis Tool
Now that you have the basic information that you need, the next step is to use a competitor analysis tool to begin the backlink analysis – starting with your domain-level competitors. Using the competitor analysis tool, you can extensively crawl through the web to assess up-to-date metrics across all relevant backlink parameters.
For instance, you can use Ahrefs Backlink Checker, as it is one of the best tools for competitor backlinks analysis. This tool will generate a comprehensive report after performing an in-depth analysis of your competitor’s backlinks. The report will include the following details:
The Site’s DR: DR is a metric that indicates the relative strength of the website’s domain profile on a scale from zero to a hundred.
The Number of Backlinks: This insight will give you the total number of backlinks that the competitors have gained from various online resources.
UR of Referral Pages: Ahrefs also provides the URL rating, which indicates the strength of the linking profiles across the referral pages. This rating is also from a scale of zero to a hundred.
Breakdown of Top Backlinks, Anchor Texts, and Web Pages: You will get an insight into the top one hundred quality backlinks and their respective publishing pages, along with a compilation of prominent destination URLs.
You get the point: the right competitor analysis tool will help you discover the backlink profiles along with the respective DA scores and other metrics of the referral domains.
Perform Competitor Link Analysis
Now that you have chosen the right backlink analysis tool, you can assess several important attributes of the competitor’s backlink profile.
You might want to start by assessing the URL link profile attributes and getting insights into the number of referring domains and backlinks. You will also assess the number of inbound links that your competitors gained and lost during the last six months. Also, assess the types of backlinks that point to your competitor’s website. More importantly, you will get useful insights into the most prevalent words and phrases in the anchor texts.
Using the backlink checker tool, you can also perform a backlink gap analysis, which is crucial to establishing a solid SEO campaign to help your website outrank that of your competitors. That said, the entire point of performing a backlink gap analysis is to assess the referring domains that are pointing to the websites of your competitors but not to your website.
Subsequently, you can tap into those link-building prospects and reach out to them to secure high-quality backlinks.
Potential Benefits of Leveraging SEO Competitor Backlinks
Now that you know how to perform competitor backlink analysis, you should also know the benefits of leveraging SEO competitor backlinks.
Discover Actionable SEO Benchmarks
When it comes to performing competitor backlink analysis, it can help your website’s SE as you get to discover actionable SEO benchmarks. The reason is that your competitors are not random sites, but they are already ranking at the top of Google. The sites have already established a rapport with Google, which means that you can leverage their actionable SEO benchmarks, such as content and website loading speed, to boost your own website.
Explore New Link-Building Opportunities
Competitor backlink analysis will help you explore new link-building opportunities as you discover all the referring domains that your competitors have already partnered with. You can also scrape any potential data on competitors’ backlinks and reverse-engineer them by reaching out to the webmasters of the referral domains.
Flag Up Weaknesses
You should know that competitor backlink analysis isn’t necessarily about tracking high-quality and authoritative backlinks. The analysis will also help you flag weaknesses, such as low-quality referral domains, that can impact Google’s PR algorithm.
Final Thoughts
You can leverage competitor backlinks to improve your website SEO – starting today. If you are new to the world of SEO, it can be challenging to find niche-relevant link-building opportunities, which is why you should learn from the strongest industry leaders who also happen to be your competitors, as they provide the perfect hack for this. By analyzing your competitor backlinks, you can discover great link-building opportunities. The use of free backlink analysis tools can make the entire process so much easier for you.
If you want to save time and effort, we are more than happy to offer our link-building and outreach services that can help you outrank your competitors. If so, get in touch with us today!
FAQs
How to search competitor’s backlinks for specific keywords?
Using the right tool of your choice, you can search for a website domain to find inbound links. Proceed to filter keywords. Analyze the results and reach out to the respective bloggers to get high-quality backlinks and outrank your competitors.
What is a good tool for backlink analysis?
You can use the Ahrefs backlink checker tool to assess your competitors’ backlink databases. Their tool can also generate insightful reports that can help you improve your website’s SEO.
Can you check backlinks on Google?
You can use Google Analytics to find and track backlinks, which are also referred to as “referrals” in the Traffic Acquisition report.
