Introduction
In the world of SEO, finding ways to outshine your competition is the key to success. One of the most effective strategies in your arsenal is to analyze your competitors’ backlinks. This practice, known as competitor backlinking, allows you to gain insights into their link-building strategies and identify opportunities to strengthen your own website’s authority. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll delve into the world of competitor backlinking, explaining what it is, how to find competitor backlinks, and how to evaluate them to gain a competitive edge.
Finding and stealing competitor backlinks is a terrific strategy to get your audience to see your content. Why? You must achieve the coveted first-page ranking on Google. That top place receives 90% of all traffic. The rest of the search results are forced to compete for the remaining 10% of traffic. While most marketers recognize the necessity of using SEO (search engine optimization) content marketing to achieve this aim, many overlook the value of backlinking – a catastrophic mistake.
How to Find Competitors Backlinks
Backlinking is just as essential as content marketing. Backlinking and content marketing are the two most essential search ranking factors, although they are weighted equally.
Regardless, 95% of websites have no bhigh quality acklinks.
Build your backlink strategy by identifying and stealing the referring sites that your competitors are using to scale their search ranks.
Do you want to know how to find competitor backlinks in order to establish a strong backlink strategy?
Continue reading for a step-by-step guide to locating competitor backlinks and assessing their value to your SEO strategy.
What exactly is competitor backlinking?
Backlinking is one of the most efficient SEO strategies for achieving the number one search result on Google.
But how do you ensure that you outperform your competitors?
You investigate their connected building strategy and demolish it. This is referred to as competitive backlinking.
Competitor backlinking is an SEO approach in which you examine the backlinks of rival websites to determine the sorts, quality, and amount of backlinks you require.
This aids in the development of a more solid and effective link building plan for your own website. Take, for example, backlink outreach. The most effective approach of link building is to contact potential referral websites.
You’ll have a better sense of the more effective referral websites by studying your competitor’s backlinks, so you can reach out to them for your own link building approach. You may also use a backlink checker tool to evaluate your competitor’s backlinks.
A two-pronged attack is required when examining your competitors’ backlinking method.
You must investigate two sorts of competitors:
- Competitors at the domain level
- Competitors on the first page
- Competitors at the Domain Level
Competitors at the domain level compete with your website as a whole.
These websites are in the same industry as you or provide similar information. They essentially target the same audience that you are attempting to attract. These competitors are competing across their entire domain to score highly for many of the same keywords as you.
Because uSERP provides backlinking services, our domain-level competitors will include SEO businesses, backlink service providers, and digital marketing organizations. Backlink-related themes are also used by these sites to improve their search engine visibility.
Page Competitors
Individual pages that rank competitively for the same target keyword as one of your pages are referred to as page-level rivals.
These websites may not provide similar services and may not be attempting to reach the same audience as you. Instead of the entire site, these specific pages compete.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Competitor Backlinks
Discovering your competitors’ backlinks is an effective technique to supplement a successful link development plan. After all, if it works for them, it’s likely to work for you as well.
Follow these simple steps to do a complete link analysis on your competitors’ backlinks.
- Determine Your Primary Keywords
If you want to know who your competitors are, you must first understand how they compete.
Target keywords are critical to a successful SEO strategy when it comes to rising the ranks on a search engine. Your key competition will be those who have a backlink profile that is identical to yours.
To identify your direct competitors, you must be aware of every target keyword that contributes to your search engine visibility.
While you may be aware of the keywords you’ve actively incorporated into your SEO plan, it’s also a good idea to use a keyword tool to determine which other keywords are popular on your site.
Perform a keyword study on your website using a tool such as Ubersuggest, Spyfu, or Morningscore. You may also use Google to search domain names for competitors who rank higher than you to find fresh keywords you may not have considered.
Simply enter your website into the keyword tool, and it will return a list of popular keywords, along with their rankings and search traffic.
Make a list of the top-performing keywords, as here is where you should begin. You’ll gain greater awareness if you move an article from ninth to second position rather than from 30th to 20th.
Use these terms as a starting point. Tools such as Keywordtool.io, Ask The Public, and Google Keyword Planner can assist you in locating relevant keywords as well as identifying competitors.
- Determine Your Primary Competitors
You must now identify your primary competitors. These are the top competitors for your desired keywords on Google.
Begin by conducting a’related’ search on Google.
This will display all websites with subjects related to yours.
Enter the following into the search bar:
related:[your website URL]
Some of your domain-level competitors can be found by conducting a relevant search.
Spyfu is another tool for locating domain-level competitors:
Enter your website into Spyfy and click the ‘Competitors’ option to see a list of linked websites.
The SEO tool will also show you how much overlap there is between these websites and how many keywords you share.
Then, for each desired keyword, conduct a keyword search.
Note the top competing pages on each search engine results page (SERP).
You’ll notice that certain websites appear repeatedly. Add these to your domain-level competitor list.
Page-level competitors may only rank for one or two focus keywords, but they are equally essential.
Beware. Avoid customized searches.
Because personalized searches deliver results based on your searches, they will distort the results you see on each SERP. Because your searches are likely tied to the content of your own website, you will see different results than the ordinary searcher.
To avoid a tailored search, change the URL of your SERP.
- Using a Backlink Checker Tool, examine Domain-Level Competitors
A backlink checker enables you to investigate the domains that connect to your domain-level competitors.
Because these are your main competitors, you’ll want to figure out which of their referring websites is the most effective — and then steal them.
While many tools, like as Ahrefs and SEMRush, are valuable, you must pay to use their backlink analyzing tool. SEMrush is very pricey, particularly if you wish to purchase more user seats for your team.
While Moz Link Explorer has a premium option, you may evaluate the top backlinks of your competition for free. Because you’re only interested in the backlinks that perform the best, this backlink tool is a good place to start.
Here’s how to use Moz Link Explorer to conduct a domain-level competitor analysis:
Go to the link analysis tool and be sure you choose ‘root domain’ to search the entire website. Enter each competitor’s website one by one.
Click on the ‘Linking Domains’ number. This displays all of the distinct domains that connect to your competitors’ websites.
The domain authority for each site may be seen in the list of connecting domains. Sites having a high domain authority are good sources for referring inbound links since Google considers them valuable, relevant, and trustworthy.
Check to see if the connecting domain has a low spam score. Google has prohibited features on sites with high spam ratings. This reduces the backlink’s effectiveness.
Entrepreneur.com, for example, is a better backlink than feedburner.com. While feedburner has three points more domain authority than feedburner, feedburner has a 50% spam score.
You want to know which websites are linking to some of your competitors. The simplest method is to export the data to a CVS file, import it into a spreadsheet, and then identify duplicate items.
You may also view which articles are connected to your competitors by clicking the download arrow. This offers you an overview of the type of content from which each referral links.
This method must be repeated for each of your domain-level competitors.
- Using a Backlink Analysis Tool, investigate page-level competitors.
While page-level competitors do not compete with your entire site, individual articles can knock you off the top spot, capturing 90% of organic traffic.
On Ubersuggest, here’s how to conduct a page-level competition backlink analysis:
Search your own website with the Ubersuggest keyword tool. This will display a list of the top keywords for your website.
When you click on a target keyword, the right-hand table displays the top competing pages for that key term.
Page-level rivals can be identified because they do not compete for the same target audience or offer the same services.
Click the orange numbers under the links column in the table of backlink competitors to analyze the backlinks for each article one at a time.
When you click through, you will be directed to a list of hyperlinks.
To view the most influential pages, filter the backlinks by domain authority. Alternatively, sort the results by the ‘last viewed’ column to determine which pages have most recently referred visitors.
Find the sweet spot. These websites have strong domain authority rankings and have recently referred visitors.
Export each article’s CVS and enter the results into a spreadsheet.
Repeat the process for each competitor page, then compare the results to discover which referral pages emerge again.
- Examine Keywords That Are Semantically Related
After you’ve exhausted all of your top keywords, you should look into semantically related terms. After all, some of your competitors may have a little different SEO strategy than you, so they may not appear when you search for your specific top key terms.
Using the same SEO tool as before, look for each of your top keywords. This will provide the top pages that employ semantically related terms.
Click through to these pages’ backlinks and export the backlink data from these articles for a more detailed backlink analysis.
- Identify the Top Referring Websites
After you’ve gathered all of your data, it’s essential to do a thorough backlink analysis to identify the most valuable referring websites.
As previously said, you should seek out sites with high domain authority ratings and pages with high page authority scores.
The domain authority score or page authority score of a website indicates its likelihood of ranking highly on Google. More people see high-ranking Google sites and pages, which means more clicks for you. Aside from ranking, you must also ensure that the website is secure and well-designed, using a reputable hosting provider.
Remember to avoid pages with high spam scores. Because these sites and pages do not sit well with Google, they will not rank as highly.
Look for sites that have lately referred visitors. Just because a site was once a popular source of backlinks doesn’t mean it now is.
Investigate backlink chances on sites with strong organic traffic. The more people who visit a website, the more probable it is that they will click your backlink.
Finally, look for well-known referrers in your field. Competitors targeting the same audience as you will have backlinks on the same sites as others in your industry.
When you put all of your backlink data into a spreadsheet and filter it by A-Z, it’s easier to find duplicates.
You will begin to see the most popular referrers for each topic you cover if you construct separate spreadsheets for each target term.
How to Assess Competitors’ Backlinks
Backlinks are not all made equal.
You want high quality backlinks from credible sources to bring actual value to your link building plan.
Similarly, in order to maximize the benefits of your own link building strategies, you must ensure that you are taking advantage of backlink chances correctly.
Here are a few easy strategies for analyzing your competitors’ backlinks.
Quality of Backlinks
While quantity is vital, high quality backlinks will serve you better.
High quality backlinks not only have better organic traffic, but they also have a higher domain authority. This means that these websites will rank better in Google, boosting your search engine rankings.
Avoid forums and spammy blogs when researching your competitors’ backlinks.
Look for trustworthy media outlets, significant opinion leaders, and well-known industry blogs.
Determine referrers with high domain authority and page authority ratings, a high volume of organic traffic, and new content.
It’s also a good idea to select referring pages that have a lot of their own backlinks. More clicks will result from more referrals to your referring page.
Backlink Positioning
Take note of the locations of backlinks in each article.
Consider it logically. Which links are you more likely to click after reading an article?
Some links are extremely visible, appearing above the fold or alongside compelling content. Others are stumbling around in the footer or at the bottom of the piece.
If you’re looking at prospective link chances and the site wants your anchor text buried in the article or surrounded by other links, look elsewhere — that one’s a dud.
Backlink Pertinence
Many sites attempt to increase backlink quantity by paying for links on referring sites, regardless of the site’s content.
Your best backlinks will come from sites with relevant information because your audience is considerably more likely to click on a useful link.
Find backlink chances where your content or product can add value to the article the visitor is reading. If a reader believes they can learn more by clicking a link, they will do so.
You won’t get any clicks if it looks like a spammy product advertisement masquerading as an anchor link.
Conclusion
Now that you know how to uncover competitor backlinks, you should start planning how to incorporate these backlinks into your own SEO strategy. But keep in mind that not all backlinks are good chances. Analyze each backlink carefully to ensure that you’re selecting reference sites that are related to your product or service while also exhibiting expertise and authority to your target audience. You don’t want to waste time on ineffective links.