Your Guide to Competitor Backlink Analysis

Competitor backlink analysis is the process of examining and evaluating the inbound links pointing to rival websites. It helps identify valuable link-building opportunities, uncover successful content strategies, and guide efforts to improve your own website’s search engine rankings by replicating or surpassing competitors’ backlink profiles.

Use a competitive link analysis to:

• Determine the number and quality of backlinks your competitors have secured and how many you may need to reach competitive parity.
• Find domains that are linking to competing sites and not yours.
• Gain insight into your competitors’ link-building techniques.
• Strengthen your backlink profile and improve your search rankings.

Benefits of a Competitor Backlink Analysis

The goal of a backlink competitor analysis is to enhance your SEO and gain better search visibility, but there’s an array of other benefits that come with this process. These include:

• Improving productivity. It’s time-consuming to find relevant, authoritative sites for link building. A Competitive Analysis directs you to quality linking opportunities more quickly.
• Setting goals. You’ll have a better idea of where your site stands in relation to competing ones so you can set targets for your strategy.
• Informing your approach. When you have insight into how your competitors are managing their backlinks, you can discover new methods to incorporate into your strategy.
• Staying competitive. Your SEO success hinges on how other sites are performing. Keep tabs on your competition so you stay in step with them even if they dial up their backlinking efforts.

Best Competitor Backlink Analysis Tools

To perform an effective competitor backlink analysis, you need a powerful tool to pull relevant data and find gaps in your strategy. The most effective platforms speed up the analysis process by comparing backlinks of more than one website at a time. Tools with a large database of indexed backlinks provide a greater pool of referring domains to choose from.

Here are some tools to consider:

• Semrush: Semrush updates its Backlink Analytics tool every 15 minutes to provide current data. Its Backlink Gap tool compares inbound links for a total of five domains. The report tells you how many of the analyzed sites each referring domain points to.
• Ahrefs: The Link Intersect report in Ahrefs draws on a database of 35 trillion backlinks, updated every 15 to 30 minutes. Once you enter your domain and competing domains, you can see a table of referring websites, their Domain Ratings, and how many of the competing sites each referring site links to.
• Moz: Moz’s backlink Competitive Analysis tool, Link Explorer, boasts a database of 45.5 trillion links. Its Link Intersect report shows which backlinks your site is missing compared to five competing domains.
• SE Ranking: SE Ranking’s Backlink Gap Analyzer, with 2.9 trillion indexed backlinks, compares your inbound links with those of up to five other sites. You can see Domain Trust and Page Trust metrics to assess the quality of different backlink opportunities.

How To Conduct a Competitor Backlink Analysis

In this section, I’ll guide you through a competitor backlinks analysis using Ahrefs and Semrush, two of the more feature-rich platforms. If you’re using other tools, you can still follow the general steps as a guide.

1. Identify Your Competition

For a good cross-section of backlinks to analyze, choose three to five competing websites in your industry. Look for competitors that target keywords similar to yours. 

Because you want to uncover the most promising backlink opportunities for your brand, the sites you choose should also rank well in organic search, demonstrating they’re authoritative and have successful link-building strategies. 

If you want to establish a potential link velocity for a particular keyword, you’ll want to look specifically at the pages outranking yours.

Identifying Competitors With Ahrefs

1. Log in to Ahrefs Site Explorer.
2. Enter your domain and click “Search.”
3. Under the Organic Search menu, click “Organic Competitors.”

The Organic Competitors report shows the top competing sites for your keywords, ordered by the percentage of keywords they have in common with your website. Look at the Common Keywords column for the specific number of shared keywords. 

Ahrefs provides Domain Ratings and estimated monthly traffic data to help gauge each competitor’s authority. 

To narrow your selection of competitors, visit their websites to determine whether their offerings, niche, and target audience are similar to yours.

Identifying Competitors With Semrush

1. Navigate to the Semrush Backlink Analytics tool.
2. Enter your domain and click “Analyze.”
3. In the top navigation bar, click the three dots and then select “Competitors.”

The Competitors report provides a list of domains with similar backlink profiles to yours, along with Authority Scores (AS). The sites are sorted by Competition Level, a Semrush metric based on shared backlinks. Review this data for websites in your industry and niche and with a similar target audience.

Then, return to the Backlink Analytics tool and run profiles on the competitors you’re considering analyzing. The Network Graph visual is helpful for determining if a site is a source of quality links — it notes if a site’s backlinks are relevant, reputable, moderate, or toxic.

2. Plug Competitors Into a Backlink Analysis Tool

Once you’ve chosen your competitors, run a general backlink analysis on each to gauge their strengths and weaknesses and tap into in-depth data. Use these insights to set goals to help maintain a strategic advantage. 

For example, if your competitors are building links at a faster rate, step up your efforts in that area. If they’re securing a lot of inbound links from guest blogging, consider whether that tactic suits your brand as well.

Ahrefs and Semrush provide a wealth of information, including:

• Each site’s referring domains and backlinks.
• Changes in a site’s backlink profile over time.
• New, lost, and broken backlinks.
• Geographical distribution of backlinks.
• Authority score and category/industry of referring domains.
• Types of backlinks (i.e., content, image).

Backlink Data Using Ahrefs

1. Log in to Ahrefs Site Explorer.
2. Enter your competitor’s domain and click “Search.”

Ahref’s Site Explorer brings up an overview page that summarizes key SEO data for a target site. Navigate to the options under “Backlink Profile” on the left-hand menu to learn more about referring domains, backlinks, broken links, and anchor text. For example, clicking “backlinks” generates a list of a site’s inbound links, the referring page’s domain rating, traffic, and anchor text.

Backlink Data Using Semrush

1. Navigate to Semrush’s Backlinks Analytics tool.
2. Enter your competitor’s domain and click “Analyze.”

Semrush’s Backlinks Analytics offers a visual overview of key metrics such as changes in a site’s Authority Score and number of referring domains and backlinks over time. You can see top backlink types, categories of referring domains, top anchor text, and pages with the most referring domains. Click any of the summaries for more data.

3. Identify Common Links & Gaps

While an analysis of a single competitor’s inbound links can provide plenty of competitive intelligence, the insights are more powerful when you compare your site and competing sites simultaneously. What are your competitors doing that you’re not? Both Ahrefs and Semrush have tools to identify backlinks your competitors share but you’re missing.

Identifying Backlink Gaps Using Semrush

1. Navigate to Semrush’s Backlink Gap.
2. Enter your domain and up to four competing domains.
3. Click “Find prospects.”

The Backlink Gap report begins with a couple of charts that visually represent changes in your competitors’ Authority Scores and the number of referring domains in the last 12 months.

Below this is a table that shows your “best” backlink prospects. These are domains that link to all of your competitors but not your site. You can apply the “All” filter to see sites that link to any of your competitors and “Unique” filter to see those that link to only one domain. Click the number below each competitor to see the referring page, anchor text, and target URL.

4. Analyze Competitor Strategies

Now that your competitor backlink analysis has identified promising referring domains, explore the data and see how your competitors are approaching link building. Review their backlink profiles to see if they’re focusing on guest blogs, podcasts, or directories. If articles are quoting them, they may be doing public relations or responding to quote requests.

You can find useful nuggets of information when you consider the type of content the referring domains are pointing to. Your competitors might be publishing original research or tools like calculators that attract a lot of links, indicating clear interest in this content type in your industry.

Use these insights to find prospective new backlinks and inform your own game plan. A backlink analysis template can help track opportunities.

5. Choose Sites To Reach Out To

You should now have ideas for expanding and diversifying your backlink profile. Determine which sites to approach and create a plan for your link-building outreach.

Links from authoritative sites carry more weight and pass link equity to your web pages. You can use Ahrefs’ Domain Rating and Semrush’s Authority Score to look for reputable sites, but note that Google doesn’t use these proprietary metrics. As it can be challenging to land backlinks from high authority domains, consider credible sites that may have a lower authority rating but can send traffic and a similar target audience to your pages.

Aim for links from a variety of sources and group them by type of opportunity to make your outreach more efficient.

• Directory submissions are the most straightforward, so consider starting with these and doing them all at once.
• You can plan and pitch guest posts as part of your content marketing strategies to streamline efforts.
• Uncover broken links to competing websites and suggest your own web pages as a replacement.
• Look for roundups and “best of” blog posts that linked to your competitors and introduce yours for possible inclusion in the future.

Refining Your Backlink Strategy: What To Do Next

Link building only works as part of a wider SEO strategy. I’ll share a few final tips to help you maximize your competitive link analysis.

• Create valuable, helpful content. The domains you’ve identified have shown interest in your industry or niche by linking to competitors, but you need to publish exceptional content that’s worth linking to.
• Keep your keyword strategy up to date. Make sure your site is relevant by performing a competitive keyword analysis on a regular basis. This helps you target the best keywords for your industry.
• Monitor backlink analytics. Regularly monitor your backlink profile and those of your competitors for changes in the number of referring domains and inbound links. Adjust your strategy as needed and watch for new competitors that may be making an impact in the SERPs.

Build High-Quality Backlinks To Outpace the Competition

From identifying promising domains to securing authoritative backlinks, link building is a resource-heavy task. Our experts at Victorious can customize your link-building strategy and put it into action, helping you boost your authority and visibility in search rankings. Reach out to our team for a free consultation and learn more about generating sustainable business growth with our link-building services.