Link building is a crucial aspect of any successful SEO campaign, but many questions arise about competing with your competitors' backlink profiles, how to replicate them, and whether it will lead to success.
Usually, your main competitor’s backlink profile is typically very strong, highlighting the importance of having an organic and natural backlinks profile. This has become especially crucial following Google's core spam update rolled out in March 2024.
In this post, we’ll provide a step-by-step guide on how to find competitors backlinks for link-building opportunities properly. By the end, you’ll know how to find backlinks, analyse competitors backlinks and points about running successful link-building campaign using a backlink analysis template
Why Do You Need a Competitor Analysis?
Every SEO expert knows that competitor analysis is a must-have before taking any action in link building or launching a full search engine optimization campaign.
There are many benefits to conducting a competitor backlink profile analysis, including the following:
- Gaining insights into top backlinks of your competitors
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Understanding how to find competitors backlinks and what types of backlinks they use (guest posts, links insertions, forum backlinks, blog comments, profiles, infographics, PBNs, directories etc.)
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Identifying keywords difficulty which they use to get high rankings
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Checking how fast they build their links (this’s really important as you may want to replicate the dynamics in your own backlink profile)
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Gaining insights into the ratio of dofollow to nofollow link equity
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Identifying the relevance of the competitors backlinks and websites metrics.
More importantly, monitoring competitor backlink analysis using ahrefs or majestic will give you a clear picture of how many backlinks you need to build for your own backlink profile. You'll gain some insights into which keywords to target for building your semantic structure, how quickly to build links, and how to estimate the approximate budget you'll need to invest in link building.
Where To Find Competitors
There are many ways to do a profile analysis of your competitors. You can analyze the competitors backlinks on your own. You can also hire a pro competitor analysis service.
If you want to do it on your own, you will need the best backlink checker tool, like Ahrefs, for monitoring backlinks and doing backlink analysis.
Thanks to the Ahrefs tool, you can quickly analyze a competitor's site. Here’s a simple yet effective competitor analysis template that you can use.
If you go to Site Explorer and type in the domain name, you will see a brief analysis of the site as well as competing domains that you need to analyze.
Go to the Competing domains section. There you will see a list of competitors that you can analyze with the help of Site Explorer. In this way, you’ll identify their link-building strategies' strong and weak points.
In Site Explorer, you can see all the information about a competitor's site: From standard metrics to traffic metrics, geo, competitors backlinks, and more.
If you’d like to identify top backlinks, you can use filters like dofollow, nofollow, UR rating, DR, etc. Ahrefs will also show you anchor texts and types of links.
Ahrefs is the best backlink checker tool for a reason. The simplicity of Ahrefs and SEMRush is that you can download the competitors backlinks and their profile analysis in csv files. Then you can create a spreadsheet where you can filter out only the top backlinks.
Go through all the steps in this competitor analysis template and repeat the process for all your top competitors.
You can also use Ahrefs for monitoring backlinks. It’s highly recommended to keep monitoring backlinks, as your competitors don’t sleep. You need to be aware of what they are doing. It can help you to apply corrections to your link-building strategy if needed.
If you have no time or desire to do link profile analysis of competing domains, you can always outsource it to a competitor analysis service.
Tools for Checking Competitors
There are so many SEO tools out there that you can be puzzled about which ones you should use while analyzing your competition.
Without the right tools at hand, you can make a lot of mistakes that can cost you more in the long run.
Here are the three most popular tools that you may want to use for a backlink profile analysis of your competitors:
- Many SEO experts believe that Ahrefs is the best backlink checker tool. This comprehensive SEO tool offers a wide range of features, including a keyword research tool, site explorer, and content explorer. It is especially good for researching competitors backlinks and monitoring backlinks on a regular basis. Ahrefs is also known for its large database of live backlinks. This makes it an excellent tool for doing the link profile analysis of a competitor and finding good link-building opportunities for your SEO campaign. Every decent competitor analysis service should have this tool in its arsenal.
- Semrush is another great tool for SEO. It offers a wide range of features, including competitor research, analysis of competitors backlinks, keyword research, and site audits. Every good competitor analysis service uses this tool. SemRush is especially useful for monitoring backlinks and competitor analysis features, which allow you to see detailed information about a competitor's organic search traffic, paid search traffic, and more. Many people think Semrush is a good Ahrefs alternative. However, we recommend using both tools for a link profile analysis if possible. That’s because, in this case, you’ll get more data to work with.
- Majestic. The most significant benefits of Majestic for link builders are the TF (Trust Flow) and CF (Citation Flow) metrics. Both are measured on a scale from 0 to 100. They show the quantity and quality of the competitors backlinks. Don’t consider Majestic as an Ahrefs alternative. It shows different metrics and is used for different purposes. It gives you additional insights into the backlink profile analysis of the competitors.
These three tools are excellent choices for understanding the competition and finding ways to improve your SEO.
However, it is important to remember that no single tool is perfect. Even if you have the best backlink checker tool for monitoring backlinks, it may not always be accurate. That’s why you should always use a combination of different tools to get the most comprehensive picture of the competition.
Taking all these aspects into account, sometimes it is easier to hire a competitor analysis service that will do the heavy lifting for you.
Analyze, But Don't Duplicate
However, simply copying competitors' backlinks may not yield the desired results. Each website should has a unique backlink profile and linkbuilding strategy that reflects its niche, authority, and history.
Blindly replicating your competitors' backlinks without considering these nuances can lead to suboptimal outcomes or even penalties if the backlinks are seen as manipulative or unnatural. Therefore, it's crucial to tailor your backlink strategy to your specific website's needs and goals.
Сompetitor profile analysis will allow you to find loopholes, develop strategies to stay ahead of the competition. However, it is important to keep monitoring backlinks all the time, try to use special tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush for monitoring and comparing progress with main competitors.
Remember to thoroughly check backlinks yourself and not rely solely on your competitors' backlink profiles, as results can vary.
Competitors May Hide Their Links from Tools and Bots
To avoid competition, some webmasters may hide their links from tools and bots, which makes monitoring backlinks harder. This means that the backlink profile data that the best backlink checker tool shows you are actually limited.
This is because some people try to be sneaky about their backlink profiles. They don’t let others know about all the top backlinks they have. Monitoring backlinks and replicating them shouldn’t be the only strategy in your arsenal.
If you want to copy other people's links, do it in a way that makes sense. For example, don't get a link on the same page of a target domain unless it is very relevant. Also, go slowly and steadily while acquiring those precious top backlinks.
Do not try to get all of them at once. Set limits on how you replicate a backlink profile of your competitor! Depending on your niche, this may be one link a week or ten links a day.
Monitoring backlinks with the best backlink checker tool can help you make some adjustments quickly if necessary.
Summary
Competitor analysis is the foundation of every successful SEO campaign. There are many advantages of doing in-depth competitor backlink analysis.
You can get insights into which sites are linking to your competitors, find new link-building opportunities, understand what kind of content is popular in your industry, stay up-to-date on the latest trends in your industry, and monitor your competitors' link-building activities.
If you do a competitor backlink analysis in the right way, it can help you save a lot of time, money, and effort.
