If you are a novice to business, you might have experienced a lot of struggles to meet your link-building goals. The major hurdle businesses face during the early stages is making your website recognizable to the target audience.
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A Complete Guide On Competitor Backlinks 2023
Digital marketing experts use various SEO tactics, including content marketing to increase the search engine visibility of your websites. What about backlinks? Is it essential to focus on backlinks to reach your goals?
Yes, Backlinks play a critical role that would bring keen changes in Google’s positioning of your websites. Even though you are aware of the effectiveness of backlinks, do you know the need for competitor backlinks? Reading this blog, you will get a clear understanding of the competitor backlinks and the need for them.
About Competitor Backlinks
Backlinks and backlink pyramids are effective SEO techniques to improve your search rankings in search results. How will you know that you are winning over your main competitors?
So, you have to research and monitor the link-building strategies of your competitor sites. In such cases, competitor backlinks play a role.
As the name suggests, it is an SEO strategy through which you monitor and analyze the backlinks from the competitor’s site to get a clear understanding of the types, quality, and number of backlinks used.
Researching and having appropriate knowledge of competitor backlinks and their websites will help you build a strong backlinking strategy for your websites too!
By conducting proper research and effective competitor backlink analysis, you will get to know how many referral websites or domains and quality backlinks you need to beat the competitor websites.
For example, if you and your competitor have created a post on lifestyle, the site that has more inbound links will rank high.
As the site which has more referring domains will have more authority in Google so it will always have the great potential to rank in Google.
Do you know how to identify the competitor backlinks and carry out this analysis? Let’s dig in deeper. Before that let’s understand the type of competitors.
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Type Of Level Domains Competitors
There are two types of competitor Domains based on their ranking on Google pages.
- Domain-Level Domains
- Page-Level Domains
What are Domain-Level Competitors?
Domain-level competitors are the websites that compete with your whole site that comes under the same niche, industry, or similar information.
These competitors will have many common search terms and targeted keywords across the websites. You will find these sites competing with your products and services.
You can differentiate the domain-level competitors into two categories like
- inside-niche domain
- outside-niche domain.
The competitors that compete with the products and services that your websites provide. You can consider Nike and Addidas as an example. Both companies focus on the same target audience with similar products and services.
However, in the outside-niche domain, the companies or the websites might not have similar goals, but they are the sites that might target some of the same keywords that you might have.
Ex: Business 1– Let’s take an organic grocery store that sells a variety of organic produce, meats, and packaged goods.
Business 2– On the other side a business sells a meal delivery service that specializes in organic, plant-based meals, In this case, there are chances both businesses use keywords such as “Organic Foods”.
What are Page-Level Competitors?
Page-level competitors are the sites that rank competitively based on the specific keywords that you have on the individual pages. The products and services of your websites and competitors might vary from each other.
For example, if you have a website based on educational courses, you might compete with a completely different website on page level based on the same keywords.
Suggested Reads – What To Do After Keyword Research To Boost On-Page SEO?- 6 Best Ways
How to Identify Competitor Backlinks?
In order to identify competitor Backlinks first you need to know who your competitors are. There are two types of competitors,
- Business Competitors
- SERP competitors
At this point, we are not focussing on the business competitors as we want to analyze and out beat SERP (Search Engine Results Page) Competing domains.
Now in order to identify who is your SERP competitors There are a few ways,
- Simply type in your focus keyword in the Google search bar and open the list of linking domains that appear on the first page and now try to understand whether their business aligns with your business or not.
If you have found that your product or services exactly matches that domain in SERP then that will be your direct competitor if not it might be an indirect competitor.
It is always recommended to go with direct SERP competitors to make the Competitor analysis in SEO more effective.
- The second way to find your competitors would be with the help of external tools such as Ahrefs, and Semrush. These are a few of the top tools which I personally use to find out my competitors.
The common keywords indicate the keywords which you and the competitor is competing for. You are free to use efficient keyword tools for finding the top-performing keywords.
Understanding and Analysing Competitor Backlinks
Once you have identified who your competitors are by either of the methods that we spoke about above. Now our next step is to dig deeper into the competitor’s SEO profile, So in order to do that let’s take the example of simplyrecipes.com as our competitor.
Now let’s add our competitor domain in the Ahrefs search bar and click on the backlinks option to view the complete backlink profile. So here there are a few things to notice that would be,
- Total number of backlinks
- Backlinks acquired in last 30 days
- Backlinks lost in the last 30 days
- Link Type
- aDR of the Backlinks
With this, you can understand the backlinks that your competitor is building throughout the month and the quality of the links they are building.
So based on these metrics searched you can come to a conclusion of what their link-building capability is.
Look for new backlink Opportunities in Real-time
Other than the above-mentioned strategies, you could look for new backlink opportunities by analyzing and monitoring the competitor backlinks in real-time.
This method will let you know the effective link-building strategy that is effective in the current scenarios. Through monitoring real-time backlink opportunities, you could also track digital PR strategies to stand out from the competition.
It makes the process easier by helping you to choose the same websites for backlinking to win in the competitive search.
It would be effective to use tools such as Buzzsumo to monitor competitive backlinks in real-time. Using such tools, you can easily create a backlink alert by inserting the domain or the URL of the website you want to check the backlinks.
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Tracking the Competitor’s Brand Mentions
In order to disclose more backlink opportunities, tracking the competitor’s brands is also one of the best ways. As the name suggests, It is the number of times your competitor’s brands have been mentioned online and on various platforms.
Google Alerts are the best tool to track the websites covering and mentioning your competitor brands.
Here are a few steps to track the competitor brand mentions from Google Alerts
- Insert your competitor’s brand name with a quote of “Create an alert about”. This will help you to get a list of competitor brand mentions.
- You can choose the frequency such as the number of alerts you want.
- Select and insert the following details like language, location, and email address for the alerts to get notified.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is competitor backlinking?
Competitor backlinking is one of the search engine optimization strategies that would help you in discovering and analysing the backlinks of your competitor websites.
What is competitor backlink gap analysis?
Competitor backlink gap analysis is all about identifying and determining the pages and websites that are linked with your competitor websites.
Let’s Focus on Competitor Backlinks
The reverse engineering competitors backlink profile doesn’t always gonna help if you are focusing on outreach a mass campaign but nevertheless, it stands as one of the best ways for all the buddy websites if you are planning to outreach to a limit of 50 to 100 prospects.
Now you might have got a clear understanding of how to identify your competitors and analyze their backlink profiles. Following these steps, you could easily create an effective link-building strategy and win over competitor sites.
You are free to approach link-building experts or SEO companies for competitor backlinks analysis and robust backlink strategies to make your website more visible in Google.
Looking for a perfect platform to improve your website rankings on Google? Reach out to Linksprout.io for effectual link-building services.