Want to reach the top of Google’s results for the keywords that matter to your business?
If so, a strong backlink profile is an absolute necessity.
Backlinks are simply links on other websites that point to yours, but they have a special importance on search engines.
On Google, a backlink acts as an endorsement of the page it links to.
This endorsement vouches for the quality and trustworthiness of a web page, AKA its ‘authority.’
So, it doesn’t take long for newbie site owners to realize they need to build backlinks to rank higher on Google and other search engines.
The only problem is..
Where are you supposed to find high-quality websites that are willing to link to yours?
After all, 91.5% of all cold outreach emails get ignored.
This makes it especially tricky for new site owners to find reliable backlink sources, but there is a solution.
It’s to analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles.
This is beneficial because:
- They’re in your niche
- They likely have lots of backlinks from relevant websites
- You can also pitch guest posts and link insertions to these sites
When done properly, a competitor backlink analysis will provide you with a ton of new opportunities.
In this article, we’ll teach you how to conduct a thorough backlink analysis of your competitors, so stay tuned!
Why Do Competitor Backlinks Matter for SEO?
Why are your competitor’s backlinks such a powerful tool?
To understand why, it’s important to understand some link-building fundamentals.
As mentioned in the intro, we stated that backlinks on Google and other search engines act as endorsements of your content.
Accordingly, backlinks are an official ranking factor used by search engine algorithms.
When determining the order to rank search results for a given keyword, hundreds of ranking factors are taken into account, and backlinks are one of the most significant.
In particular, the algorithm looks for:
- Backlinks coming from reputable websites
- A natural-looking backlink profile (diverse backlinks with no evidence of manipulation)
If it finds both, the content is more likely to rank well, unless the website’s competitors have better content with stronger backlinks.
Therefore, backlinks are something every website needs to compete in the search rankings.
Preface: Understanding domain authority
The best backlinks will have strong domain authority, which is a metric (a numerical score of 1 – 100) that represents how likely a domain is to rank in the SERPs. The higher the number, the more ‘authority’ a domain has, which means that Google trusts its content and views it as high-quality.
How do you build a higher authority score for your domain?
By building high-quality backlinks, of course!
You can use Moz’s Domain Authority (DA) or Ahrefs’ Domain Rating (DR) score (we use both) to determine if it’s worth pursuing a backlink from a website or not.
| What’s the difference between Domain Authority and Domain Rating? While both are scores intended to gauge the ‘ranking power’ of a domain, there is a difference between the two.
Ahrefs’ Domain Rating only looks at a domain’s backlink profile, while Moz’s Domain Authority factors in other on-page and off-page SEO factors (like content quality and social media presence). We like to use both scores to get a truly comprehensive view of a domain’s ranking ability. |
Our free domain authority checker tool is a great way to quickly measure a website’s DA, and it won’t cost you a dime!
Benefit #1: Analyzing competitor backlinks will help you gain the edge
Okay, now it’s time to dive into why it’s a good idea to study your competitor’s backlinks.
In a nutshell, it’s like letting someone else do your homework for you.
Let’s explain.
New websites face a daunting task whenever it comes time to build backlinks, mainly because they typically don’t know where to start.
While they know they need backlinks coming from relevant sites in their niche, it can be extremely difficult to know where to look, let alone pitch a guest post or draft an outreach email.
Like we said earlier, most cold outreach emails are outright ignored, so getting your footing with link-building can be a real crapshoot.
Things will become easier, though, once you start viewing your competitor’s backlink profiles.
As long as the competitor you analyze shares the same target audience, their backlink profile is bound to be chock full of:
- Relevant business directories
- Backlinks from websites that accept guest posts in your niche
- Websites that are open to link insertions (where you place a backlink into an existing piece of their content)
- Possible link partners
These are all perfect opportunities to pursue, especially since you have social proof that they provide backlinks.
Not only that, but you also can use a competitor’s backlink profile to customize your outreach.
Benefit #2: Using competitor backlinks to tailor your outreach methods
As a real-world example, imagine you run a website that sells gardening tools.
One of your top competitors, then, would be https://www.gardeners.com, an extremely popular gardening supply store.
When using a tool like Ahrefs to analyze their backlink profile, you notice that one of their backlinks is a link insertion coming from a site with a high DR.
Obviously, you’d like to score a similar link to improve your ranking power, so you decide to pursue a link insertion of your own.
First, it’s time to do some detective work. By analyzing the link insertion on the web page, it can help you form a more compelling pitch.
Here’s the backlink in question:
As you can see, the link insertion is for their Cat Scat plastic mats, and it comes from a website with a very high DR of 75.
This tells us two things:
- The Alley Cat website is open to product link insertions
- You could likely acquire a similar backlink for one of your products
Therefore, your strategy should be to find an article on their site that directly relates to one of your products. From there, reach out to the site owner with a personalized email requesting that they link to your product since it would add tremendous value to their users.
This is a simple example of how you can use a competitor’s backlink profile to your advantage, and it didn’t take very long at all to find!
Benefit #3: You can uncover backlink gaps you need to fill
Whenever another website has more backlinks than you do, it’s called a backlink gap.
As we’ve already gone over, backlinks are credibility votes to Google, and they’re a significant ranking factor.
This means it’ll be very tough to outrank a backlink-rich competitor who has significantly more links than your website (assuming that they’ve built decent links that aren’t manipulative or spammy).
Because of this, your best bet is to close the gap by building as many or more backlinks as the competitor.
First, however, you need to know that a gap exists in the first place, which is where a competitor analysis enters the picture.
By monitoring your competitor’s backlink profiles, you’ll know exactly how many backlinks they have in comparison to yours, helping you quickly identify any gaps.
Benefit #4: Replicate successful strategies
Analyzing your competitor’s backlink profiles helps you learn from the best. By studying your most successful competitors, you can reconstruct the strategies they used to build their links.
For example, let’s say your strongest competitor has a backlink profile consisting of:
- Guest posts on high-quality sites
- Listings in online business directories
- Social media profiles and forum comments
Going by this evidence, you can gather that their primary strategy was to build authority with high-value guest posts while peppering in backlinks from other sources to appear natural.
The best part?
They’re your most successful competitor, meaning that the strategy must yield great results. Since there’s no law preventing you from engaging in similar tactics, give it a go!
4 Steps to Find and Analyze Your Competitor’s Backlinks
By now, it should be clear that analyzing your competitor’s backlinks is a fantastic way to:
- Reengineer successful backlink strategies
- Brainstorm outreach ideas
- Uncover relevant websites that provide backlinks
Whether you’re a new site owner or a seasoned webmaster, knowing how to conduct a competitor backlink analysis is a must-have skill.
Without further ado, here are 4 steps to quickly find and analyze your top competitor’s backlinks.
Step #1: Find your competitors
Before you can peep at their backlink profiles, you need to know who your primary competitors are first.
This actually isn’t as straightforward as it may seem, as there are two main types of SEO competitors:
- Search competitors
- Traditional competitors
Search competitors are a little bit different than traditional competitors because you need to include every website that targets the same keywords you do.
Let’s dive deeper to learn more.
Understanding search competitors
First, let’s take a look at search competitors, of which there are two types (yes, it gets even more complicated). To make these easy to understand, we’ll use Apple as an example in both cases:
- Page-level competitors. A page-level competitor is any website that targets the same keywords you do, but they may not be in the same line of business. For example, Forbes is a page-level competitor of Apple, even though they aren’t in the computer business. This is because Forbes regularly publishes reviews of Apple’s latest products, and they target the exact same keywords.
- Domain-level competitors. A domain-level competitor is any website that’s in the same market as you. In the case of Apple, their domain-level competitors would be other computer and smartphone companies like Samsung, Asus, and Dell.
The best way to find your primary search competitors is to search for your most important keywords on Google and list the domains that appear the most.
From there, you can determine if they’re a page-level competitor or a domain-level competitor.
Finding traditional competitors
Locating these competitors is more straightforward. A traditional competitor is any website or company that provides the same products or services as you to the same target audience.
They’re all the alternative solutions to your business, so you probably already know who they are.
If not, simply do a Google search for the ‘top companies in (x) industry.’
For SEO, it’s crucial to compile a list of both your traditional competitors and search competitors.
This is because you’re going to need to outrank both.
Even if a website isn’t advertising products and services to your audience, having them outrank you for important keywords is still disadvantageous.
Consider the Forbes example mentioned previously.
Imagine that Apple just released a new product, and they’re trying to rank in the top #3 for keywords related to it. Well, if their page-level competitors like Forbes and C-NET hog those spots for their review posts (which target the same keywords), this can directly impact Apple’s online visibility, and not in a good way.
That’s why it’s crucial to consider both traditional competitors and search competitors.
Using Ahrefs to find competitors
If you have a paid subscription to Ahrefs (which comes in handy for countless SEO tasks), you can use it to quickly pinpoint your main competitors.
Here’s how to do it.
First, sign in to your account and select the Site Explorer tool. Next, enter your domain and hit the Search button.
This will take you to the Overview report, which lists all sorts of details about your website’s SEO performance.
From the top of the report, scroll down until you reach the Top Organic Competitors section that looks like this:
Here, you’ll get to see where your website lies in relation to your top competitors on this chart.
If you scroll down a bit more, you’ll have the option to view your top 20 competitors:
Doing so will take you to a more detailed Organic competitors report:
Here, you’ll get to see not only a list of your top competitors but also helpful data about keyword overlap, including how many keywords you share in common.
You can also export this list as a PDF to insert into other programs (and to print a hard copy) for further analysis.
Step #2: Analyze your competitor’s backlinks
Once you have a complete list of your competitors at the ready, you can start analyzing their backlink profiles.
A quick and easy way to do so is to use our free backlink checker tool.
Simply enter a URL into the tool and hit View Backlinks Report to see any website’s backlinks.
As an example, here’s what some of Forbes.com’s backlinks look like:
As you can see, our tool tells you:
- The total number of backlinks and referring domains
- The percentage of dofollow backlinks the domain has (dofollow links pass link juice and nofollow links don’t)
- Referring IPs
- Anchor text (the text masking the hyperlink)
- The URL for each backlink plus the page it links to
Also, each backlink receives a numerical score representing its overall strength.
It’s entirely possible to conduct a thorough competitor backlink analysis just using our tool, and it’s a great option if you don’t have a budget.
However, if you want to do a more in-depth analysis, you’ll need to use a paid service like Ahrefs.
Conducting a competitor analysis using Ahrefs
Once again, we’re going to use the Site Explorer tool for this example, so log in to Ahrefs and enter your domain of choice into its search bar.
Next, navigate to the Backlinks report on the left-hand sidebar.
This will show you a list of every single backlink the domain has. In this case, we’re sticking with Forbes as our example:
You have the option to visit each backlink, and the tool includes the anchor text and target URL. There are also valuable metrics like each backlink’s domain rating, traffic, and referring domains.
Here’s a quick rundown of what you should look for in a backlink:
- Domain Rating or domain authority score. Here, you’ll want to look for high ratings to ensure the link is worth pursuing. The closer you can get to 100, the better, but it’s not always feasible to generate backlinks from extremely high DA sites. On average, stick to DA scores of 30 and above (give or take).
- Relevancy. Even if a domain has a sky-high DR, if it comes from an irrelevant website it won’t count. For backlinks to matter, they must come from websites that relate to your website in some way.
- Anchor text. You should also pay attention to the anchor text your competitor used for the backlink. In general, anchor text that contains target keywords plus a few other phrases tends to work best, but it’s important to mix things up. You can read more about achieving the ideal anchor text ratio here.
- Link type. Check to see if a backlink is dofollow or nofollow before you try to build one from the same domain. Dofollow backlinks pass link juice and impact SEO, while nofollow links don’t (technically they do, but the amount of link juice they pass is minimal compared to dofollow).
Next, head over to the Referring domains report to take a closer look at all the individual domains that provide backlinks to your client.
This report cleans things up and provides a list of all the websites that link back to your client. As a quick clarification, a referring domain is different from a backlink in that one domain can provide you with multiple backlinks.
On Google, it’s more powerful to have three backlinks from different referring domains than it is to have three backlinks from the same domain, as their impact begins to diminish after a while. That’s why it’s worth checking this report to see how many referring domains you can gain from analyzing a competitor’s profile.
Step #3: Uncover your competitor’s strategies
Ahrefs’ Backlinks report is great for understanding competitors’ backlink strategies, as you can easily tell if a backlink is from a link insertion, guest post, or business directory.
In the example above, most of the backlinks are from journalists quoting Forbes articles and referencing their statistics, meaning these links were most certainly built naturally.
What’s that?
Natural links are backlinks that you built without any intervention on your part. In other words, another website chose to link to your content because they found it relevant and valuable, not because you sent them an outreach email.
Prioritizing prospects and backlink types
You should also prioritize your prospects using the metrics we mentioned earlier. This means placing websites with high DR scores, relevant content, and dofollow links at the top of your list.
Creating a priority list ensures that you only focus on building the strongest links first.
Besides your prospects, certain types of backlinks should also take priority.
These include:
- Guest posts. These are blogs that you write on related websites to gain a backlink and generate referral traffic. They’re a powerful type of backlink to build, so they should shoot to the top of your list.
- Link insertions. This is where you ‘insert’ one of your backlinks into an existing piece of content on another website. A common example is to add a backlink to a relevant product or service to enhance an existing blog and provide a helpful resource for readers. These links can also be quite powerful, so take note of any website in your competitor’s profiles that accepts link insertions.
- Podcast backlinks (and other types of media). If you find backlinks that came from a podcast or a webinar in your competitor’s profile, you should definitely check them out. This is because they’ll likely accept you as a guest too (since you’re in the same niche), meaning you can also pick up a backlink (and referral traffic).
Other types of backlinks, like business directory links, are also good to include, but they won’t be as valuable as the ones listed above.
Step #4: Start conducting outreach to build backlinks
Alright, the final step of the process is to start building backlinks of your own by reaching out to site owners.
In particular, your goal is to mimic the backlinks you found in your competitor’s profiles, so you’ll be targeting lots of guest posts, link insertions, podcasts, webinars, and more.
This is also where you’ll need to be the most creative because you’ll be working without a roadmap.
Up until this point, you’ve been able to use your competitor’s past actions as a guide. However, you won’t have any way to view the exact outreach emails they sent each prospect, so you’ll be on your own.
What we can give you are candid tips for conducting successful outreach.
Site owners receive hundreds of backlink outreach emails a day, so you need to find a way to stand out.
Here’s what we recommend you do:
- Personalize the introduction. It’s integral to mention the site owner’s name and a bit about what they do. Do some digging beforehand to uncover their names, the type of content they produce, and maybe a little bit about their background. Mentioning these things in your pitch can increase the chances that they’ll grant you a backlink, but don’t go overboard (a sentence or two will suffice).
- Reference their content. Here’s where doing your homework really helps. Mention an article or other type of content that you checked out and enjoyed. Besides singing their praises, you can also bring up how their content relates to yours, or that it sparked an interesting idea or concept in your head.
- Highlight the link opportunity. Don’t take too long to get to the point and highlight the link opportunity in question. In particular, mention the value that adding the backlink will provide to their website.
- Suggest the link location and anchor text. Lastly, tell the site owner where you think the backlink would work best, and propose some anchor text to use. It’ll ultimately be up to the site owner to write the anchor text, but providing them with a suggestion can help achieve the ratio you’re looking for.
Here’s an example of an outreach email that incorporates all these elements:
Hey (site owner’s name),
I checked out the piece on (content) and found it really insightful. In fact, it sparked an idea that I think you’ll enjoy. My online store sells (relevant products) that I think would be an amazing resource for your readers. After all, it gives them the chance to purchase the very thing you’re describing in the article.
I think adding a backlink on (specific area of the page) would be valuable to your audience, and it would help my SEO. You could use anchor text like (preferred anchor text), but that’s just a suggestion!
Thanks so much for your time.
(Your name)
If you don’t hear back after a week or so, don’t get discouraged. It’s perfectly acceptable to send a polite follow-up email, and doing so may speed things up.
Start Using Competitor Backlinks to Improve Your SEO Today
We’ve gone over a whole lot so far, so let’s take a moment to recap:
- It can be difficult to find relevant link-building opportunities
- Your competitors provide the perfect **** for this
- Analyzing competitor backlinks is a great way to spark ideas and find opportunities
- Tools like Ahrefs and our free backlink checker make the process easier
Now that you know what to do, what are you waiting for? Get out there and start analyzing your competitors!
Do you need help conducting outreach to capitalize on your competitor’s backlinks?
If so, we’d **** to take the process off your hands. Our 5-star Link Outreach services are your ticket to securing the guest posts and link insertions you found from your competitors, so don’t wait to get in touch today.
