In today’s competitive world, standing out in any market requires constant analysis and adaptation. Healthy competition pushes businesses to innovate, but it also demands monitoring competitors and optimizing your content to maintain visibility. A key factor in achieving this is backlink analysis, a cornerstone of SEO success.
Backlinks from authoritative and relevant sources boost your site’s ranking, while low-quality links can harm your reputation. By analyzing your competitors’ backlinks, you can discover opportunities to improve your own link-building strategy, enhance content quality, and attract more potential customers. It also helps you avoid common SEO mistakes.
This article will guide you through the process of finding and analyzing competitors’ backlinks, explain why it’s important, and highlight tools and key metrics to streamline your efforts. Use these insights to refine your strategy and secure a competitive edge in your niche.
Why Analyzing Competitors Backlinks is Important
Backlink analysis allows you to understand what link building strategies your competitors use on relevant websites in your niche. By examining their backlink profiles, you can identify opportunities to improve your content and your own SEO strategy.
- Reveal Hidden Market Opportunities
Analyzing competitors’ backlink profiles can help uncover unexpected audience segments and growth opportunities. The analysis can reveal how your niche content resonates with markets you hadn’t initially considered.
For example, imagine you create ASMR mukbang videos for a local Chinese audience. By reviewing competitors’ backlinks, you notice their content also gains traction in other countries. This insight could inspire you to collaborate with influencers or engage with online communities from these markets, allowing you to expand your content globally and tap into trends you hadn’t planned to target.
- Spot Seasonal Trends
By tracking the dynamics of the appearance of competitors’ backlinks, you can discover seasonal trends in your niche. With this information, you will have a better understanding of which events or campaigns are most popular in certain months, and in general, during which period activity is growing.
- Pinpoint Weaknesses in Their Backlink Profile
Analyzing competitors’ backlink profiles helps you identify weaknesses in their strategy and learn from their mistakes, allowing you to refine your SEO efforts and capitalize on their vulnerabilities.
For instance, you can use Ahrefs and its Historical Data graph to analyze backlinks. The graph below shows the competitor’s backlink growth, but a sudden drop could indicate a penalty for poor-quality links, lost links from an authoritative domain, or the use of Google’s Disavow Tool to clean up their profile. Investigating the cause helps you avoid similar pitfalls and find opportunities to build stronger, safer connections.
- Spot Negative SEO Risks
Analyzing your competitors’ backlinks profile gives you the opportunity to identify SEO risks such as low-quality or broken links, manipulative schemes, and also gives you an understanding of which links can be considered toxic.
With this information, you can regularly check your content to make sure that there are no such links in your profile. Moreover, knowing the weaknesses in the competitor’s strategy, you have the opportunity to improve or create better content from scratch in order to take positions that the competitor is losing.
Tools for Finding Competitor Backlinks
Analyzing competitor backlinks requires reliable tools that can provide accurate data, useful metrics, and practical recommendations. Below you will find a list of the top 3 tools for finding and analyzing backlinks.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs offers several key features to help analyze competitors’ backlinks:
- Site Explorer
Provides a detailed report on all backlinks leading to your competitor’s website, including source websites, anchor texts, and link types.
- Referring Domains
Shows a list of relevant domains that give links to your competitor’s content, helping to identify high-quality link sources whose services you can also use to attract a new audience.
- Anchor Text Report
Shows a list of the most frequently used anchor texts in backlinks, which gives you an idea of what keywords and phrases your competitor is using and what audience he is targeting.
- Link Intersect Tool
Compares your backlink profile with competitors’ profiles to discover unique links that they have but you don’t, opening up new opportunities to get similar links.
- Domain Rating
Gives an estimate of your competitor’s domain rating based on their backlink profile.
SEMrush
As a comprehensive tool, SEMrush offers a number of features that help you effectively analyze competitors’ backlinks, identify opportunities for link building and optimize your own SEO strategy.
- Backlink Analytics
Provides an in-depth analysis of all backlinks leading to your competitor’s website. It shows statistics on which sources post these links, how often they are updated, and pages with which content receive more backlinks.
- Backlink Audit Tool
Evaluates the quality of competitors’ backlinks and helps identify both high-quality and toxic links. This gives you an idea of what strategy the competitor is following and what mistakes they have made.
- Anchor Text Analysis
Analyzes anchor texts on competitors’ websites, which helps to understand which keywords they use to promote their content.
- Competitor Comparison
Enables you to analyze your backlink profile against multiple competitors in order to pinpoint deficiencies, like a shortage of high-quality backlinks, and highlights areas for enhancement in your SEO tactics.
- Referring Domains
Provides information about domains linking to a competitor’s website, which helps identify potential sources for building backlinks to your content.
Serpstat
Serpstat offers several useful features for analyzing competitor backlinks.
- Backlink Analysis
Provides a detailed overview of all backlinks to your competitor’s site, which allows you to evaluate the quality of backlinks and their impact on the SEO results of the website.
- Referring Domains
Shows a list of domains that link to a competitor’s website, which helps to assess how authoritative and trustworthy these sources are.
- Competitor Backlink Comparison
Compares the backlink profiles of several competitors to identify common link sources and new link building opportunities.
- Backlink Growth Trends
Tracks the number of backlinks of your competitors in different time periods, helping to understand trends in increasing or decreasing competitor activity.
- Keyword Research
Shows the keywords that bring competitors’ pages to the top of the search results, which helps to identify trending topics in your niche.
- Content Marketing
Indicates the pages on a competitor’s website with the highest number of backlinks, helping you identify popular topics and providing inspiration for generating fresh content.
How to Find and Analyze Competitors Backlinks: A Step by Step Guide
Step 1: Gather and filter your competitors’ backlinks
You can start analyzing the backlink profiles of your closest competitors using special tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush or Serpstat (you can see the short overview of the main features above).
Apply specific filters to narrow down the backlinks to only valuable and actionable ones. For example:
- Domain Authority: Focus on domains with medium to high authority.
- Regional Relevance: Filter the backlinks by the country or even city of origin to match your target audience or regional SEO strategy.
- Traffic Filter: Use the filter to show backlinks from pages or domains with significant organic traffic. For example, target pages with 500+ monthly visitors.
After filtering, you will have a list of potential backlinks worth investigating further.
Step 2: Prioritize and categorize backlinks
Sort the backlinks from the filtered list based on their priority and value. You can group them into the following categories:
- High-priority links: Backlinks from authoritative domains or high-traffic pages.
- Medium-priority links: Backlinks from relevant but less authoritative sources.
- Low-priority links: Backlinks from less relevant or low-traffic pages.
Ensure your backlink strategy incorporates diversity to strengthen your backlink profile. For example, include backlinks from blogs, directories, and forums. Highlight unique opportunities like a competitor’s viral post, which may reveal untapped link-building opportunities.
Step 3: Assess backlinks relevance
Evaluate the relevance of a backlink from each category. Even if your competitor operates in the same niche, not all their backlinks will be relevant for your website. For properly evaluating the backlinks you can use the key metrics described below.
Ultimately, you will have a refined list of possible backlinks that includes pertinent data and measurements. It will assist you in determining which backlinks to obtain for your content. By choosing resources carefully, you can increase the advantages of your link-building strategies, enhance your SEO results, and attract more targeted traffic to your website.
Key Metrics in Competitor Backlink Analysis
Below is a list of the main metrics that you should pay attention to when analyzing competitors’ backlinks.
Domain Authority
It is important that the referring domain is ranked in search engines. When analyzing backlinks, a high level of domain authority means that the website has great credibility, and links from it can have a significant impact on SEO.
Page Authority
Even a single page should have a strong potential to rank well in search results. When analyzing backlinks, if the referring page has a high page authority level, it may mean that it will have a significant impact on SEO if it links to your site.
Link Relevance
Backlinks from websites or pages related to your niche or industry are considered more valuable for SEO. Competitors can receive backlinks from highly relevant sources, which helps them improve their positions on certain keywords. Analyzing the relevance of backlinks can help you identify potential opportunities to get links from authoritative, relevant sources in your own niche.
Anchor Text
Keywords used in anchor texts can affect SEO rankings, as search engines use this information to understand the linked page topic. When analyzing competitors’ backlinks, the study of anchor texts helps to identify the possibilities of using similar keywords in your own content.
Inbound to Outbound Links Ratio
Evaluating the quality and reliability of a referring website can be determined by looking at the equilibrium between its incoming and outgoing links. Having a high number of outbound links compared to inbound links could suggest that the website is being used for link selling, potentially pointing to a poor quality backlink profile.
Site Security
The secure HTTPS protocol and the absence of viruses on the referring site helps to assess the security of the web resource and the trust of users and search engines in it.
Traffic and Search Visibility
This metric helps to evaluate how successfully a referring website attracts a target audience and how well it is indexed in search engines, which affects its visibility and SEO positions.
Regional Relevance
It is important that the region of the referring website matches your region, as this affects the accuracy of the search results and the attraction of the target audience from specific geographical areas.
Link Building Opportunities for Your Website By Analyzing Competitor Backlinks
Examining backlinks from competitors provides valuable insights into effective and ineffective SEO strategies to enhance your own approach.
Best Practices
- Leveraging Influencer Mentions
Identify influencers or bloggers who mention you or competitors from your niche on their platforms but don’t provide links to your content. You can contact them and offer to build a backlink to your content. This approach to link building will be more natural and relevant.
- Content Gap Analysis for Link Building
Every time you analyze your competitors’ content that attracts backlinks, try to find some aspects that were not fully covered. By creating content that fills in the gaps, you’ll be able to get backlinks from the same or similar sources because your content will be more holistic.
- Repurposing Competitor’s Successful Content
After you have analyzed the content of your competitors that attracts the most backlinks, you can try to recycle this content, making it more valuable and useful.
For example, you can update outdated statistics or display them as a chart, which will make this information easier to comprehend and perceive, and therefore more attractive to the target audience.
Bad Practices
- Over-Optimized Anchor Text
Excessive use of the same keywords in anchor texts can lead to over-optimization, and search engines may regard this as manipulation and spam.
- Neglecting Link Context
Getting backlinks from websites with high domain authority, but which contain content that is irrelevant to your niche, can harm your SEO.
- Ignoring Link Diversity
Concentrating solely on acquiring only one type of backlinks or relying on one source can make your backlink profile appear unnatural and limit the opportunities available for effectively promoting your website since it reduces the variety that search engines favor. Having a variety of backlink types such as guest posts and media mentions as well as partnerships and varied sources is important.
How to Quickly Replicate a Competitor’s Backlink Profile using Serpzilla
To enhance your website’s SEO in a fast and efficient manner, consider replicating your competitor’s backlink profile. With Serpzilla, easily discover the top-notch and related backlinks that are utilized by your competitors. Serpzilla offers two ways to search and get high-quality links: Guest Posts and Niche Edits.
Guest Posts with Serpzilla
The Guest Posts option allows you to contribute your content to the platforms of popular bloggers or reputable websites, while receiving valuable links. With this option, you can:
- explore the competitive backlinks;
- find websites in your niche that accept guest posts;
- contribute guest posts only to websites with high-quality backlinks and high domain authority.
Niche Edits with Serpzilla
Niche Edits include building backlinks into pre-existing content on relevant and trustworthy websites. Serpzilla provides you with the following features:
- Search for popular posts or pages in your niche that accept additional links.
- Using Serpzilla filters to search for relevant pages to make sure they accurately match the topic of your content.
- Checking the credibility of the page before getting a link through Niche Edit.
To get started, sign up for Serpzilla and you’ll understand how easy it is to reproduce a competitor’s backlink profile. With an intuitive interface and powerful search capabilities, you’ll be able to find high-quality backlink opportunities to your website in a short time.
Conclusion
Analyzing your competitors’ backlinks is crucial when concentrating on enhancing your SEO strategy. It assists in evaluating the SEO tactics used by both your competitors and yourself.
By conducting this analysis, you can pinpoint your strengths, areas for improvement, as well as identify mistakes to steer clear of. Based on the example of someone’s backlink profile, you can identify the main good practices that you also need to follow to keep up with your competitors. And special effective tools will help you avoid bad practices.
Serpzilla is an essential assistant for automating the backlinks building on high–quality resources, which provides you with services allowing you to enhance your backlink profile and increase its diversity, authority and trustworthiness.
