What is Competitor Backlinking?

Backlinking is one of the most effective SEO strategies to help you achieve that number one search result on Google.

But how do you make sure you’re outperforming your competitors?

You research their link building strategy and throw it away. This is called competitor backlinking.

Competitor backlinking is an SEO technique where you can analyze the backlinks of competing websites to understand the types, quality and number of backlinks you need.

This helps you create a more robust and effective link building strategy for your own website.

There are two types of competitors,

• Domain-level competitors
• Page-level competitors

Domain-Level Competitors

They compete with your website as a whole.

These sites are in the same industry as you or offer similar information. Basically, they target the same audience you are trying to reach.

Page-Level Competitors

Individual pages that score favourably for the same target keyword as one of your pages are referred to as “page-level rivals.”

These websites may not offer the same services and may not generally attempt to target an audience similar to yours. Instead, these individual pages compete against the entire site.

1. How to Find Competitor Backlinks: A Step-by-Step Guide

Finding your competitors’ backlinks is a powerful way to develop a successful link building. Then, if it works for them, it will work for you.

Perform a thorough link analysis to lift the hood on your competitors’ backlinks by following these simple steps.

Identify Your Main Keywords 

If you want to know who your competitors are, you need to know how they compete.

When it comes to climbing a search engine’s rankings, target keywords are critical to a strong SEO strategy. Your main competitors will have a similar backlink profile as you.

To find these direct competitors, you need to know each target keyword that contributes to your search engine visibility.

Identify Your Main Competitors 

Now you need to identify your main competitors. These are your top performers on Google for your target keywords.

Start by conducting a Google “related” search.

It will show you all the websites with topics related to you.

Type this into the search bar:

related:[your URL website]

Websites returned from a relevant search are your domain-level competitors.

Do a keyword search after that for each target keyword.

Note the best competing pages on each search engine results page (SERP).

Beware. Avoid personalized searches.

Personalized searches will skew the results you see on each SERP as they return results based on your searches.

Use a backlink checker tool to examine your competitors at the domain level.

A backlink checker allows you to examine linking domains that lead to your domain-level competitors.

Since these are your closest competitors, you’ll want to know which of the websites they refer to are the most effective — and then steal them.

While many tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush are useful, you have to pay to access their backlink analysis tool.

Investigate competitors at the page level using a backlink analysis tool.

Even if page-level competitors don’t compete with your site overall, these individual articles can knock you off the top spot and capture 90% of your organic traffic.

Ubersuggest by Neil Patel is one of the best free quality backlink tools to analyze the link profile of your page-level competitors.

Analyze Semantically Similar Keywords

Once you’ve looked at all of your keywords, you need to research keywords related to semantics. After all, some competitors will have a slightly different SEO strategy than you, so they may not show up when you search for your specific keywords. Using the same SEO tool as above, search for each of your keywords. It will display the best pages that use semantically similar keywords.

Pinpoint the Top-Referring Sites

Now that you’ve gathered all your data, it’s time to do a deep dive backlink analysis to find the most valuable referring domains. As was already mentioned, you want to search for websites and pages with high domain authority scores and page authority scores. A site’s Domain Authority Score or Page Authority Score indicates how highly it ranks on Google. More visitors see sites and pages that rank higher in Google, which means more clicks for you. Apart from ranking, you should also ensure that the website is secured and well designed by a reputable hosting provider.