Competitor backlink analysis is an advanced SEO technique where we spy our competitors backlink profile to frame our off-page SEO strategy.
What is the Competitor backlink analysis?
Competitor backlink analysis an off-page SEO technique where we carefully examine the off-page activities of our competitors.
The advantage of this legal stealing comes handy and help us in avoiding mistakes that our competitor has done and also helps us in framing much stronger SEO strategy both Off-Page and On-Page.
What is the need for Competitor backlink analysis?
A backlink is one of the most important parameters for page ranking which we achieve via keyword promotion backlinking strategy.
We can further divide backlinks into two categories:
- Do-follow Backlinks
- No-follow Backlinks
Creating backlinks refers to laying down a bridge between two websites. A backlink checker tool is useful for checking the number of backlinks created for your website. Some tools provide detailed information while some just provide the number of backlinks.
A good number of Backlinks is essential for increasing the rank of your website in the search engine results page which ultimately affects your website domain and page authority.
7 Tips Competitor backlink analysis?
Following are some ways of performing Competitor website analysis:
1. Research for their Keywords:
The first step is to find out what keywords your competitor is using for ranking. SEMrush or Ahrefs are some tools which may help in finding the target keywords.
To find your competitors keywords using SEMrush, go to the SEMrush website and enter your competitor’s URL and under organic search click on options to see the keywords your competitor is ranking for.
2. Analyze your competitor’s site:
Keyword Density:
The first thing you should look for after keyword research is keyword density, it tells you how aggressive you have to be with your keyword placement.
After you got the keywords, search for them on major search engines like Google and find the top 10 websites.
Use “Keyword Density Analysis Tool” for analyzing the keyword density for all the top 10 websites and then average the Keyword Density depending on your article word count.
This will give you a brief idea about the number of times you need to use a particular keyword.
Meta information:
The next step is to analyze their Meta information and find out these following factors:
- Are they using LSI keywords for their site?
- Have they used meta descriptions on their page or alt text on the images?
If they are lacking in these factors, then make this your strong point by completing all the factors and stand out of the crowd.
Backlinks
You can use the Ahref tool to find out the number of links and the sites it links them with. This will give you an idea about the number of backlinks you need to outrank your competitor. Remember, the goal must be to rank with as fewer backlinks as possible because more backlinks, may make your website look suspicious to Google. Hence target do-follow backlink rather than no-follow.
3. Content Analysis:
A page with high-quality content has better chances to rank than a page with low-quality content and a lot of backlinks. The primary aim should always provide quality content rich in information and facts.
Here are some points which you should keep in mind while analyzing your competitor’s content:
Word Count:
Use the Keyword density tool to count the word length of your competitor’s page and then average it to get a general idea about what length you should maintain for your content so that your website outranks all your competitor websites.
Content Uniqueness:
Carefully analyze the contents of your competitor’s website so you can create content which differs totally from your competitor’s website and much more engaging. You should properly write a researched, comprehensive and unique article.
Media used:
Find out whether your competitor uses videos or images in their contents. Images and videos help in attracting more visitors and also makes your article look engaging. It improves the user’s experience.
4. Analyze their website Design:
Website design plays a major role in attracting visitors. Suppose your website is not mobile friendly, then you are missing out those visitors who want to visit your page through their phone.
Your website needs to be user friendly and compatible with both mobile and PCs. Check your competitor’s website and if they have a beautiful design, it means you have to make your design even better to outrank your competitors.
5. Analyze their My Business Page:
While analyzing, try to find out the following points:
- Do they have reviews?
- Frequency of updates?
- Followers of their page?
- Post engagement?
- Media Usage?
If they don’t have all the things mentioned above, then that’s your opportunity to outrank your competitor.
6. Analyze their Social Media:
Analyze their social media page and check:
- Number of Followers?
- How they are promoting their website?
- Customer Engagement?
- Frequency of a new post?
Maintaining a good social media presence is important to build relationships, promote your product and interact with your customers.
You can use SocialMention.com to find if they have an engaging audience or not. You can also use Social Signals Checker tool to check the social shares of a page.
Check if they make videos promoting their website or products on YouTube, if they don’t, then take advantage.
Analyze their Offline Strategies:
Branded searches are one of the main reasons analyze your competitor’s offline marketing efforts.
Branded search impacts SEO results in two ways:
1. Branded searches increase the click-through rates in the SERPs.
2. It shows Google that users want to know more about your site and they want to return to your website
Most sites use offline marketing strategies like advertising, direct mail, newspaper, radio, conferences, etc.
To find what offline strategies your competitor website is using follow these approaches:
For direct mails, Google queries like:
- “competitor + flyer”
- “competitor + mailer”
You may also use “Who’s Mailing what” services.
- For newspaper, grab a local paper or find online versions of any paper.
- Magazines, google “brand + as seen in”
- YouTube, use YouTube’s search function “competitor commercial”
- Conferences, Google queries like “competitor name + intitle: sponsors”
Competitor backlink analysis using link explorer:
Follow these steps:
Step 1: Go to Link Explorer
It is a tool used for researching the backlink profile websites. It shows the quality of inbound links using metrics like Domain Authority, Page Authority, and Spam Score.
Step 2: Enter your competitor’s website URL
Open your competitor’s website and copy the URL then paste it in the link explorer. This will reduce any chances of a spelling mistake.
Step 3: Navigate to the “Inbound Links” tab
The Inbound link tab will display all the pages they link. To identify the links which are delivering link equity, just set these parameters as Link type-Follow and Link Status -Active, it will show all the external backlinks which are providing link equity on your competitor’s site
Step 4: Export backlink data into .csv
Through Link explorer export data to .csv, save these results and then repeat this process for all your competitor sites.
Step 5: Compile all the .csv results
Compile all the results got from the Link Explorer for all your competitors into a spreadsheet.
Step 6: Sort Backlinks by Page Authority
Page Authority estimates the likelihood of a page to rank in the search engine results based on our understanding of important ranking factors. If a page gets high scores on the scale 1-100 developed by Moz, then the page is authoritative and will probably rank.
High Authority pages deliver more link equity to your competitor’s site.
Step 7: Review the linking sites
After all these steps, you will surely get a list of sites they link for keywords, so look at those sites and try to build up a relationship with them. It may help you get some high-quality links.
5 Best Free & Paid Competitor backlink analysis tool
SEMrush
It is one of the most famous tools with multiple features. SEMRUSH has an extensive database which gets updated every day to provide you accurate results. They show details like which TLD’s zone is linking you to most pages or the country from which you are getting the most links.SEMRUSH is not a free tool but it gives you a trial period of 14days and if you like it, you may purchase it for $199.
Link Miner
LinkMiner is one of the best tool available in the market. It allows you to do various things enjoy analyzing 50 backlinks every day, search for backlinks based on a different category, analyze the strength of backinks, etc.
Ahrefs
It allows you to see the top 100 backlinks of any website or page. Ahref offers a detailed analysis of backlinks and provides information about:
- Anchor text distribution
- Dofollow links
- Nofollow links
- Lost backlinks
- New backlinks
Open Link Profiler
It is a free backlink checker tool by SEOProfiler. Enjoy features like checking fresh backlinks pointing to your site, etc. It also allows you to export 1000 backlink data into .csv format.
BuzzSumo
This tool is available both in free and paid versions. The paid version has added features which allows you to check backlinks to your domain or any individual page. It also has options of exporting backlinks into .csv
Have you checked: 14 Off-Page activities to achieve success