You’re struggling to build strong backlinks to your website, and you can’t figure out why. You’re following all the rules, but you’re still not driving more traffic to your site. A big problem you might be having is a failure to analyze and learn from competitor links.
Building authority through backlinks is challenging because you’re still new, unvetted in your marketplace, and don’t have strong relationships yet. Fortunately, you can adopt a strong strategy to uncover, analyze, and leverage competitor links for better rankings by using a backlink checker tool. This article is here to help.
Let’s dive in.
Key Takeaways
- Competitor links are backlinks on authoritative websites that link to your competitor’s website.
- It’s important to know what your competitor is doing so you can evaluate their strategies and compare them to your own. Analyzing competitor backlinking is crucial as it helps identify benchmarks in the types, quality, and quantity of backlinks necessary for improving your own site’s ranking.
- You can take competitor links by offering better content and tailoring outreach messages to linking websites.
Understanding Competitor Backlinks
Analyzing competitor backlinks is a crucial step in understanding your competitors’ link building strategies and identifying opportunities to improve your own website’s backlink profile. By examining the backlinks of your competitors, you can gain valuable insights into their link building tactics, identify potential link partners, and develop a more effective link building strategy.
When you delve into competitor backlink analysis, you uncover the specific websites linking to your competitors, the type of content that attracts these links, and the overall quality of their backlink profiles. This information is invaluable for shaping your own link building tactics and ensuring you target high-value, relevant links that can boost your search engine rankings.
What Are Competitor Links?
Competitor links are the backlinks on authoritative websites that link to your competitor’s website. An example would be if you run a beauty products and services website, and your biggest competitor has a backlink in Vogue, Cosmopolitan, or Elle Magazine.
Likewise, you run a software company whose biggest competition has backlinks in Entrepreneur or CNET.
You want those backlinks because we know that backlinks are an essential driver of traffic to your website and a signal of credibility and authority.
Now, how do you find them? Many business owners have no idea where to even start with building backlinks, much less how to find your competitor’s backlinks. The good news is those two missions can be one and the same.
Understanding which backlinks you should be aiming for often begins with looking at what backlinks your competitor has and analyzing your competitor's backlinks. Here’s where to start:
Benefits of Analyzing Competitors Backlinks
Analyzing competitor backlinks can provide several benefits, including:
- Identifying Link Building Opportunities: By examining the backlinks of your competitors, you can identify potential link partners and opportunities to acquire high-quality backlinks. This can help you build a robust backlink profile that enhances your website’s authority.
- Understanding Competitor Link Building Strategies: Analyzing competitor backlinks can provide insights into their link building tactics and help you develop a more effective link building strategy. You can learn what works for them and adapt those strategies to fit your own needs.
- Improving Search Engine Rankings: By acquiring high-quality backlinks from relevant websites, you can improve your website’s search engine rankings and increase your online visibility. High-quality backlinks are a significant factor in how search engines rank websites.
- Enhancing Website Credibility: High-quality backlinks from reputable websites can enhance your website’s credibility and trustworthiness. When authoritative sites link to your content, it signals to search engines and users that your site is a reliable source of information.
Identifying Your Competitors
Identifying your competitors is a crucial step in analyzing their backlinks and developing an effective link building strategy. There are two types of competitors: entire site competitors and specific page or keyword competitors.
Entire Site Competitors
Entire site competitors are websites that compete with your website across multiple pages and search terms. They may not be sites that sell the same products as you, but they may still be competing with you for search engine rankings and online visibility. To find entire site competitors, you can use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to analyze your website’s backlink profile and identify competitors that are linking to similar websites.
Understanding who your entire site competitors are is essential for a comprehensive backlink strategy. These competitors often have a broad influence in your industry, and analyzing their backlink profiles can reveal valuable link building opportunities.
Specific Page or Keyword Competitors
Specific page or keyword competitors are websites that compete with you on a specific page or keyword level. They may be websites that are targeting the same keywords as you or websites that are competing with you for search engine rankings on a specific page. To find specific page or keyword competitors, you can use tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs to analyze your website’s keyword profile and identify competitors that are targeting the same keywords.
By identifying specific page or keyword competitors, you can focus your link building efforts on the most relevant and competitive areas. This targeted approach can help you outrank competitors for key search terms and drive more traffic to your site.
By following these steps and leveraging the insights gained from competitor backlink analysis, you can develop a robust link building strategy that enhances your website’s authority, improves search engine rankings, and drives more traffic to your site.
Identify High-Value Links
But wait, what are high-value links? High-value links are those with relevance and domain authority. These can include well-known publications like CNET, USA Today, Vogue, or Vanity Fair, or another company linking to them. Finding competitor backlinks is crucial for improving your search engine rankings.
When you find those links, look for patterns among them.
- Does your competitor have a guest post on this publication that links back to their site?
- Are those backlinks broken? This would mean that when you click on the link, it no longer leads to their web page.
- Are their backlinks found on resource pages?
These are all opportunities for you to jump in and provide better content and more authority or expertise for those publications, essentially ousting your competitor.
Competitor Backlink Analysis Strategies
Now that you’ve found your competitor’s backlinks, start your competitor link analysis. You’ll want to examine the anchor text to see what the context is around the link. If your competitor is used as an expert or resource, you could step in and showcase yourself as a more worthy resource.
Look at what type of content they’re linking to and what type of content the backlink is found in. How could you position your content as superior? Could it be written better? Can you provide more value to the publication’s readers?
Explore the linking pages in depth to see how you could provide a stronger link for the publication than your competitor is providing.
When you understand your competitor’s approach to gaining backlinks from high-value publications, you can outcompete them, offering more value. This means better guest posts, PR, and partnerships.
Link Building Strategies to Capture Competitor Links
Once you identify and analyze what your competitors are doing, you can come up with effective backlink strategies to overtake your competitors and take their links, highlighting you as a strong leader in your area of expertise and lending authority to your own site. Here’s how:
Replicate Their Backlinks
The first and most obvious approach to find competitor's backlinks is to approach those publications linking to your competitor’s site and personalize a pitch to them. Outline why you would be a better resource for them and for their readers.
Note: You want to make sure your content actually provides better value, and then show them.
Outreach to Provide Value
Next, work with outreach partners like Reporter Outreach to secure media backlinks. This will provide you with valuable quotes to secure high-quality links.
Then, when you input a competitor's domain into backlink analysis tools, you can uncover their total backlinks and referring domains. This allows you to approach your competitor’s backlink providers and show that you already have a strong reputation with other backlinking sources.
Broken Link Building
But what can you do with those broken links you found? When you identify broken links through tools like Ahrefs, make sure you also use these tools to find competitor backlinks. Then, when you reach out to the publications, offer your content as a much better replacement to the linking website.
Leverage Resource Pages
If one of the backlinks you find is to a resource page, you don’t even have to edge out the competition. By analyzing competitors domains using tools like SEO SpyGlass, you can identify valuable backlinks and reach out to the owner of the resource page to offer your content and expertise as a valuable addition to their page.
Still, backlinks can be tricky. You don’t just want to get any old backlinks onto your website. At best, it does nothing for your website. At worst, it can bring down your credibility and even your ranking on Google. Here are a few common mistakes to avoid:
Overlooking Relevance & Quality
Acquiring more backlinks is essential, but irrelevant or low-quality links won’t provide long-term value because Google simply doesn’t put much weight on those. Also, having links affiliated with low-quality websites could potentially even lower the quality of your own website.
Using Generic Outreach
You don’t want to send a copy/paste outreach message to publications asking for backlinks. They get dozens if not hundreds of those each day. Personalized communication and targeted pitches, along with identifying and utilizing target keywords, are key to getting noticed and selling these publications on the value you will add to their site.
Ignoring Competitor Patterns
Failing to study competitor strategies and link sources, including analyzing a competitor's backlink profile, leads to missed opportunities. You have to know your competition, especially if they’re more successful than you. Even poorly executed strategies can help you learn what not to do. Always know what your competition is doing, and decide how to behave accordingly.
Why Use Reporter Outreach for Link Building?
Reporter Outreach is an excellent service to partner with to grow backlinks for your web pages. This highly reputable backlink partner offers:
- Outreach expertise for securing links from high-authority publications.
- Tailored strategies for healthcare, SaaS, and e-commerce businesses.
- Time savings while providing ethical, effective results backed by proven methods.
Final Thoughts
In the end, it is important to have a strategic approach to link building for your website. High-quality backlinks will help you rank higher on Google, help drive more traffic to your pages, and show readers that you're an expert in your field.
To that end, a critical strategy for link building is to understand what your competition is doing, where they have backlinks, and how you might be able to compete. Explore services like Reporter Outreach for professional support and backlink outreach efforts.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How do I evaluate the quality of a backlink opportunity?
Look at factors like how relevant the linking is to your content, the quality of inbound links, how high the site ranks on Domain Authority (or Domain Rating on Ahrefs), where your link will be placed on the page, whether the anchor text feels natural, how much traffic the site receives, and the general trustworthiness of the site.
Are there risks involved in targeting competitor links?
There are generally small risks for targeting competitor links, as you will simply be providing more value to the linking website.
What types of content are most effective for earning competitor backlinks?
You're in a competition, so you want your content to have high authority, reputable sources, clean and comprehensive research, and interactive elements. You also want to make sure your content is data-driven, with infographics to support your data, is visually appealing, and provides unique value.
How-to posts and other posts that explain or guide a reader are great examples. Remember, you're showing linking websites that your content is better than your competitors.
How do I approach outreach without appearing spammy?
When you're drafting your message to the linking website, personalize it and add expert insights. Show how your insights are relevant to their site, how it will help their readers, and why you'd make a great partner.
