Researching competitor backlinks is a crucial strategy in Off-page SEO. It includes analyzing, creating, and adjusting link acquisition tactics based on competitors' backlinks profile to boost search engine rankings, pinpoint weaknesses, and enhance your link building approach.
To start building a backlink strategy, it’s important to identify keywords, competitors, and sites with the highest number of links. To do this, we use various backlink analysis tools that allow you to make a deeper assessment of your competitors' link profile.
Identification of the current website position
We analyze the current state of the site using metrics from different services. By checking how the metrics coincide or differ, you need to understand how different services see your site in search.
We use the TOP-3 services for analysis: Ahrefs, SEMrush, and MOZ. All of them have a similar algorithm for evaluating a website, but mathematically, the domain ranking(authority) and other indicators are different, so they will differ in numerical terms.
Ahrefs
SEMRUSH
MOZ
We can see that the analyzed website has the similar domain authority, keyword count, and organic traffic per month from the 3 services. This information is more useful for the site owner to assess the current state of the site from different services.
Identification of competitors
The Organic Research Competitors report will provide you with a complete list of top competitors and possibly some promising new one.
We also use a parameter called "competition level" to indicate how closely your domain competes with another. The level of competition depends on two factors: how many ranked keywords your competitor has and what percentage of them are common keywords with yours.
We analyzed the top competitors in the niche. The data from these reports provides you with a list of your top competitors, as well as new promising competitors.
Each of the screenshots shows the level of competition, so you can see how closely your domain competes with another.
The level of competition is estimated by several factors:
Keywords
How many ranked keywords your competitor has and what percentage of them overlap with yours, as well as.
Domain rank (authority)
How much the competitor's domain ranking is higher or lower than your site.
Number of keywords in the SERP
If your site has 100+ keywords in search and 20 of them are in the top 10, and your competitor has 500 and 100 of them are in the top 10, obviously, the competitor will get more traffic and rank higher.
Number of referring domains
If a website has a more global link profile, it’s very difficult to compete with it and surpass it in the search results.
We select the biggest competitor from this list for further analysis. We choose those domains that have the largest number of keywords and where the intersection of keywords with our site is the largest.
Analysis
We chose to analyze the competitor's backlinks profile: legaladvice.com
A quick look lets us know that the competitor's website is engaged in long-term link building and receives traffic from search. It also has a stable domain ranking, natural growth of linking domains and keywords.
Let's take a closer look at the link profile of legaladvice.com
✔ Number of backlinks
(First of all, we check the number of unique domains, as this is one of the main signals of its importance and link building power)
In total, about 885 unique domains link to the domain, which indicates a diverse link profile and regular link building for this site.
✔ Quality of backlinks
(Although quantity is an important factor, but the quality of backlinks has a significant impact on the backlink health of your site)
When analyzing the links of this site, we always start by evaluating the link metrics, i.e. these are the main parameters of DR sites that link to the competitor's site.
On the positive side, there is a mark in Ahrefs (BEST LINKS), which allows you to view the number of links that Ahrefs crawler marks as the best for this site in terms of quality.
These are usually links in articles. With DR> 20 and traffic of the domain itself > 500.
If "Best links" are about 1/5 of the link profile, it's a good signal of a real domain authority.
Example:
In our backlinks services, whether it is forum links, insertions into ready-made articles, or guest posts, we always focus on DR>20 and traffic>500, which allows our clients to get sites that can really transfer link weight.
There is also another side to it.
When looking at a full link profile of 800+ unique domains that link to this site, 200+ domains are just garbage and that's just the surface.
Check the examples:
The screenshots shows approximately 200+ domains with DR<1, as there are 100 results per page. These are usually sites that are not useful, so you need to update regularly both Ahrefs and Search Console Disavow tool and reject these links.
✔ Backlink relevance
(We check backlinks from websites that link to the site, articles or forum threads should be relevant and relevant to the subject of the customer's site)
After reviewing the links that have metrics acceptable to us with DR>20. We conclude that the links are relevant and relevant to the subject matter of the site.
Examples:
✔ Variety of anchor text
(The presence of a variety of anchor text gives search engines a signal about the naturalness of link building and the relevance of related content)
The competitor uses a diversified anchor list with the main emphasis on branded anchors and non-anchored links, which allows search engines to perceive the placement of links more naturally.
Important: use the optimal strategy of 40% anchor links (commercial, etc.), 60% (non-anchored and branded)
Tips and conclusions
After analyzing competitor, we can draw several conclusions about your future link building strategy:
1. Using 90% of placement in articles with branded anchors is a good strategy, but for natural link building you need to use different types of links (article, forums, profile, directories) in combination, so the search engine will see a diverse increase in links and it will not cause fears that you are buying links.
2. The competitor's website has a positive link growth trend for several years with an increase of 5-10% per month. This is also a good signal for Google because the link profile looks organic with a gradual increase.
3. The emphasis in the anchor plan is on branded queries, but this is not a good strategy, as it can cause spamming of the anchorist, it is important to always diversify anchors and adhere to well-known ratios.
If you require similar or more in-depth competitor backlink analysis, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. Simply provide us with the details of your project, and we'll be more than happy to assist you.
