Building backlinks is critical to the success of your website’s SEO strategy. Backlinks are formed when another website links to yours. In other words, a website includes a link in its content that brings users back to your site or a specific page on your site. Backlinks are also known as inbound links or incoming links.
So, why are competitor links important for your website, and why is it worthwhile to invest time and effort in finding and replicating rival backlinks?
The solution is straightforward: backlinks help your website rank higher in search engine results. In reality, the two key ranking variables are links and content, giving you a good notion of how important backlinks are to your website. You gain more views and traffic if your website ranks higher, and you can make your site more profitable.
Copying your competitors’ link development strategies is an effective link building technique. We’ll go over backlink replication in three stages in this article:
- Stage 1: Create Backlinks
- Stage 2: Identify and replicate competitor backlinks
- Phase 3: Keep Ahead of the Competition
Are you ready to mimic your competitors’ backlinks? Let’s get started!
Step 1: Create Backlinks
Let’s look at how you may prepare ready to reproduce backlinks by studying the fundamentals, recognizing your competition, and remaining organized.
- A) Backlink Fundamentals
To best capitalize on backlinks, you must first understand three features of them. You can boost your site’s rating if you keep these three traits in mind.
Quantity
The more backlinks your site has, the higher it will rank. However, because not all backlinks have the same weight, purchasing a large number of low-quality backlinks is not a good investment. Continue reading to understand more about this critical distinction and the significance of a website’s domain authority linking back to you.
Variety
Backlinks to your site should ideally appear on a wide range of websites, from forums and blogs to industry-specific directories and websites. The greater and more different your backlinks, the better your site will perform, especially if you pay attention to domain authority.
Domain Ownership
You desire backlinks from high-domain-authority websites. The higher a website’s domain authority, the more desirable the backlink and the more weight it lends your website. To summarize, if authoritative sites link to your site, search engines will regard it as reputable.
Keep these characteristics in mind as you begin your search for backlinks.
- B) Determine Your Competitors
Before you begin looking for backlink chances, you must first identify your competition. This is an important initial step in establishing a robust backlink profile.
To begin, divide your competitors into two groups: those who compete with your entire site and those who compete with you on a specific page or keyword level.
Competitors Across the Entire Site
Sites that compete with your overall website compete with you across numerous pages and search terms. They may not sell the same things as you, as we define a competition in traditional business, but they compete for equivalent terms.
You can locate these competitors by searching and organizing competing domains by keyword overlap, which is the number of terms the sites share with yours.
Competitors for a specific page or keyword
While some sites do not compete with yours in general, they do compete for certain keywords or search subjects. These sites may or may not be in the same industry as yours.
Pick one of your posts and search for the core keyword to locate these competitors. You can look to see which websites are doing well for that keyword.
Remember that there may be some overlap between the overall site and single page competitors. For this phase, concentrate just on the site that competes with you on a specific page-level.
- C) Maintain Organization
Take a time before beginning a competitor analysis to organize your backlink tracking. To separate the domain name, the content of a website linked to, and the material on your site that could replace it, use a spreadsheet or Google sheet. If you choose, you may also include the domain and page authority for the sites.
Find and replicate competitor backlinks
In the second stage of replicating backlinks, you will need to manually and with an SEO tool research your competitor’s backlink profile in order to mimic your competitors’ backlinks.
Investigating the Backlinks of Your Competitors
Now that you’ve identified your competitors, you can investigate their backlink profile. To detect rival backlinks, use a backlink checker tool to determine the authority of their website. Then examine their inbound links. External backlinks are the best link prospects to consider. Then you can see which pages on your competitor’s site are the most popular.
Once you’ve determined which postings are the most popular, you may conduct separate searches to determine why they’re so frequently linked. Check to see if the page makes extensive use of visuals or infographics, or if their most popular postings are of a similar length. Look for trends that explain why a site links to that post rather than the one you have on the same topic.
After you’ve considered how you can develop content that is superior to your competitors’, you’ll want to determine which domains share the most of your competitors’ backlinks and whether those sites match your specialty or business.
After you’ve completed competitor backlink analysis and discovered these sites, you can start replicating your competitor’s backlinks and establishing your own backlink profile.
8 Specific Techniques for Replacing Competitor Backlinks
Now that we’ve covered the importance and benefits of backlinks as well as identifying competitors, let’s get into the intricacies of reproducing your competitors’ backlinks to benefit your own site.
Use Homepage Links
Starting with your competitors’ homepages makes logical sense. Your goal here is to discover where your competitors’ homepages have received backlinks and why the site has highlighted them rather than you.
look the backlink analysis report for your rival and use a dofollow filter to view backlinks associated to your competitor’s homepage to look for homepage mentions. A dofollow backlink helps a website rank higher in search results by allowing search bots to follow it rather than nofollow backlinks, which are ignored by search engines.
Try to figure out why a site chose your competitor over you now that you can see your competitor’s home page backlinks. Examine the anchor text, surrounding link text, and page title for hints. Once you understand why your competitor received the backlink rather than you, you can adjust your content or produce fresh material that is superior to theirs.
When your content is complete, contact the sites that are listing your rival and explain what you can provide them and how you can assist them. This strategy of reproducing links entails determining which sites link to your competition, why your competitor received the connection over you, and then copying them to obtain the link for yourself.
Produce Better Content Than Your Competitors
Backlinks and content are the two most important variables in enhancing your search rank. You want to make sure you have the best, most authoritative content available so you can compete with them and possibly steal their backlinks.
Determine your competitors’ most popular material, then consider how you may improve on it. Do you require more information or better organization? Graphics, infographics, photos, and charts are all popular. Including these, if applicable, in your article may assist propel it to the next level.
Look for websites that link to multiple competitors.
If there are domains linking to several of your competitors, you should absolutely be listed on that site. When you find a site that matches several of your competitors, it’s most likely a link hub, which is an excellent area to build links.
Link hubs can take the shape of forums, niche-specific blogs, or industry-specific directories and communities. These sites receive a lot of traffic from potential clients, thus getting a backlink on these domains is critical.
A little word about forums: don’t ignore them! There are a lot of potential clients who will be interested in your site if they hang around in forums.
Guest post on the same websites as your competitors.
Guest posting is one of the simplest strategies to obtain high-quality backlinks for your website. When you create guest articles for blogs, they frequently give you byline links in exchange for the material, which means you get a backlink immediately.
Offering an exchange is a positive technique of approaching website owners whose sites you want to post on. You can create articles for them, and they can write articles for you, so that the partnership benefits both sites.
Guest posting is a great way to get backlinks from a variety of websites, broadening the scope of your backlink profile.
To find out where your competitors are guest posting, run an advanced search on Google using an author’s name, the phrase “guest post,” and the URL of the competitor’s website. You can also use Google Chrome to perform a reverse image search to identify posts that include the author’s headshot.
Create Connections with Fans of Your Competitors
If certain websites are providing backlinks to your competition, they are likely to be eager to cooperate with you as well, especially if you are producing better content than your competitors.
To find out who is linking to your rival, search for their website and use a backlink checker to examine their backlink profile. You’ll be able to identify who your competitor’s most frequent sharers are, and you’ll be able to explore why they’re sharing it and how you might replace it with something better.
When approaching the owners of these websites, take the time to explain how you can benefit their site by providing stronger content. It may even be beneficial to introduce yourself and develop trust by offering a link to your work in the initial contact. Building relationships is essential for establishing a high-quality backlink profile.
You can frequently contact website owners via their website, a company homepage, LinkedIn, or other types of social media, such as Twitter, if they utilize them for work purposes.
Keep an eye out for new backlinks from your competitors.
You can set up an alert for new backlinks to your competitors’ pages. As soon as you receive an alert, contact the website and explain how your content might benefit their site.
If you’re trying to reproduce backlinks in this manner, make sure to move immediately. Pages are more likely to be revised soon after they are published, thus timing is critical.
It’s also a good idea to limit this strategy to a single page or keyword-specific rival. Competitors’ whole sites will gain hundreds of new hyperlinks per day, making them impossible to monitor.
Offer to Refresh Outdated Content
In your study, if you come across any old content, contact the webpage and offer to fix it in exchange for a link to your site. Updating stale content is ideal for obtaining backlinks from a range of websites in order to improve your search engine position.
If you don’t already have content ready to replace the obsolete information, this strategy may not be worth it. Unless, of course, you uncover the same outdated text on multiple pages and may obtain a large number of backlinks from the same updated content.
It may even be worth the time if the outdated material appears on a webpage with high domain authority and plenty of traffic, which will have a favorable impact on your site’s search rankings.
Locate the Broken Links of Your Competitors
Broken links are an excellent source of backlinks, especially if you can identify them on a large number of pages. When you come across a broken link, you can give your material as a replacement to repair the damaged page. You can even generate fresh content to correct the links if necessary.
Staying Ahead of the Competition
The purpose of copying backlinks is to eventually establish a large and diverse profile that will allow you to outperform your competitors. To accomplish this, you must first determine whether a backlink is worth replicating and then concentrate on establishing a backlink strategy that includes measures other than duplication.
How to Determine Whether Replicating Backlinks Is Beneficial
The most important thing to remember when growing your backlink profile is to be patient. Don’t rush things by attempting to buy backlinks. Search engines can determine which sites are selling links, and those sites are penalized. Backlinks from them will be of little value, thus you must assess whether a competitor’s backlink is worth repeating.
Sadly, duplicating rival links isn’t always worthwhile. You must use your own discretion to determine which links are low-quality garbage or spam and which are worth your time and effort. Some links, in fact, are hard to recreate. You should concentrate on backlinks that are possible for you to obtain, such as those from pages relevant to your niche.
Create a Backlink Strategy
You will always be one step behind your competition if all you do is try to imitate their links. The difficulty in replicating links is attempting to understand what your competitors are doing to build links. These findings can assist you in creating future material to optimize your backlinks.
One basic and easy-to-implement strategy is to let other sites know they can connect to yours. It may appear obvious: if you own a website, you obviously want other websites to connect to it, but some individuals are unsure and don’t want to mistakenly steal stuff that isn’t theirs.
To minimize confusion, include a quick sentence at the top of your piece inviting people to share it as long as they link back to your original. That is merely one basic step you can take as part of a larger strategy.
A complete backlink strategy is required if you want to outrank your competitors. You have the best chance of outranking your competitors if you employ a variety of link-building strategies.
Last Thoughts
Replicating your competitors’ backlinks might be a great approach to increase the linking profile of your own site. There are various strategies for stealing backlinks from your competition, and all of them are worthwhile. Perhaps you’d like to create some guest pieces, seek for fresh backlinks, or build relationships with your competitors’ fans.
Whatever way works best for you, be sure the connections are worthwhile. When link building, you want a lot of them, but you also want them to come from high-authority sites that cover a wide range of topics. When you uncover rival backlinks, you can use them as a model to figure out how to get more backlinks from high-quality websites.
However, while replicating backlinks, keep your expectations in check. You want to outrank your competition, not fall behind them, therefore you must employ a variety of link-building strategies.
You have nothing to worry about as long as you create the greatest content in your niche. Simply be patient and selective in the links you pick to replicate. If you do this, your website’s ranking will rise, eventually exceeding even the most formidable of your opponents.