For years, competitor backlink analysis has been a universal process for any SEOs who are instantly looking for link opportunities.
The approach not only presents a quick analysis of your competitors’ existing links but could also uncover insights into their current strategy and help you generate ideas for your link building campaign.
The typical process goes like this:
- Use a backlink analysis tool such as Ahrefs, Majestic, or Moz.
- Review your competitors’ backlink profiles.
- Identify the types of links they’ve acquired.
- Start building links based on your findings.
While this provides a good benchmark, this type of analysis is not comprehensive enough to inform you of what’s happening in the industry from a link perspective and help you drive forward your next link building.
In this guide, I’ll show how we do advanced competitor backlink analysis, which includes:
- Selecting different types of competitors for backlink analysis (not just your direct competitors).
- Doing link gap analysis to answer the question, “how many backlinks do I need to rank?”
- Seeing patterns in linking pages and understanding why the site acquired the links.
- Replicating the exact link building strategy (or doing even way better) to leverage available link opportunities in specific markets.
Let’s get started.
What is competitor backlink analysis?
Competitor backlink analysis is the process of reverse engineering your competitors’ backlink profiles to see their existing backlinks, uncovering insights and strategies for your own link building campaign.
How to Perform Competitor Backlink Analysis?
There are many link intelligence tools available on the market. I use Ahrefs throughout this guide, given its huge link database and useful features for better analysis.
Step 1: Identify websites with which to reverse engineer.
Competitor link analysis starts by determining the domains/pages you want to assess.
I’ll give you the different types of websites or businesses on which to do competitor link analysis.
Direct Competitors
For example, if you’re selling bathtubs in London, you probably have a list of direct competitors in your space (as you may have done market research as you start your business operations).
If not, you can search for organic competitors ranking for the keyword you vet on. These are your direct competitors.
Direct ranking competitors are currently ranking for head terms you’re also competing with.
Ahrefs has a feature that shows you your direct competitors. You can find them by looking at “Organic Competitors” under “Organic Search.”
What it shows you depends on your input.
Using the “domain” and “subdomain” target modes will show you organic competitors that rank in the top 10 organic search results for the exact keywords from which your website gets the most traffic.
Using the “exact URL” target mode or “path” target mode shows you competing pages that rank in the top 100 organic search results for the same keywords that your target gets the most traffic from in the top 10 results.
For example, using Ahrefs’ Organic Competitors to find competitors of a potential client – JustBaths, it shows two types of direct competitors:
- A niche direct competitor – e.g. Omnitub, an online store selling only bathtubs
- A brand with a competing product category – e.g. Bathroom City with bathtubs as part of its product line/category (they’re selling other products besides bathtubs).
I could find link opportunities by reverse engineering both websites: Omnitub’s exact URL/Path target mode and Bathroom City’s Domain target mode.
Big Websites
Direct competitors are the tip of the iceberg for competitor backlink analysis. There are many other niche-related sites where you can find thousands of link opportunities.
For example, Wayfair UK is an online retailer that offers a wide selection of furniture, home decor, and household items. With DR73+, you can collect hundreds of link opportunities through backlink analysis.
If I were building links for this niche, I would start by assessing pages linked to the specific category page – Bathtubs. Then, once I exhaust the opportunities, I would look at sites linked to the entire domain (including links to other category pages).
The benefit of competitor backlink analysis for big websites is that it widens your link prospecting scope. This means that after looking for highly relevant link opportunities (in our example, you only want to find bathtub-specific publications/blogs), it only takes time before you exhaust all opportunities covering bathtub topics.
This is where you need to tap into 2nd to 4th degrees of backlink relevance, and it goes like this:
- 2nd degree of backlink relevance – websites that are not focused on your target content but have sections or categories strongly related to them. (e.g. home improvement, DIY, interior design, retailers with bathroom sections, etc..).
- 3rd degree of backlink relevance – websites that do not focus on your target keywords and have no categories about them but belong to the same general industry. (e.g. home and garden, architecture and design, real estate, sustainability, etc..)
- 4th degree of backlink relevance – websites that don’t belong in the same industry/topic niche but can publish articles related to its core content theme and your website’s. (e.g. health and wellness, parenting, travel, luxury lifestyle, fitness and recovery, etc..).
Conducting competitor backlink analysis for large websites allows you to tap into the second to fourth degrees of backlink relevance, expanding your list of potential link targets.
Local & Geographical Websites
For local SEO, the more localized your links, the more significant their impact on your domain authority and linking pages.
Look at local businesses within the geographical area, which may not necessarily be topically relevant but are within the local context.
For instance, if you’re doing SEO for a wedding business in Manchester, you should also be searching for other local businesses in the area:
- Hospitality Lifestyle
- Well-being Local Experience
- Tourism
- Home & Interior Design
- Professional Services
- High-End Retail & Artisanal Shops
Pro Tip: Check local directories like Yelp to see what types and industries of businesses are getting the majority of listings.
When you perform competitor backlink analysis for local businesses, you find specific linkable audiences with many opportunities for linking within the context. Since most are connected via associations and organizations, linking to other localized brands is highly possible – thus, providing you with higher chances of links.
Similar Content Competitors
For product-led and content-led link-building campaigns, one effective way to promote a content asset is to contact publishers who link to similar content. Given their familiarity with the content’s theme, there’s a likelihood of getting links from these content publishers.
For instance, if I published a sleeping guide for parents, I’ll check the ranking pages for the keyphrase “sleeping” for parents guide and do a competitor backlink analysis for these pages to see who linked to them.
Pro Tip: Go one step higher by looking at other content assets that are not directly focused on your content’s theme.
So in my earlier example, it could be any content piece about sleeping tips/guide: sleep science & research, healthy sleep habits & routines, work & productivity sleep optimization, fitness, recovery & sleep performance, travel & jet lag solutions, bedroom design & sleep environment, sleep tech & gadgets, etc..).
You may lack link opportunities when you over-narrow your competitor’s backlink analysis. However, you can expand your applicable link prospects by examining other content’s themes.
Step 2. Get Backlink Data of Competitors
Plug each website into Ahrefs (or any link intelligence tool).
Navigate to the Backlinks report page.
Filter for “one link per domain, ” then export the data as a CSV.
Step 3. Derive Insights and Strategy From Analysis
The next step is to analyze the backlink data and uncover insights and ideas for a link building strategy.
Initially, we start with a link gap analysis.
Link Gap Analysis
Link gap analysis (or “backlink gap analysis”) determines the difference between your competitors’ links and yours.
It answers the question, “how many backlinks do I need to rank?”.
Through link gap analysis, you’ll get an estimated number of links and how much effort you need to put into your link building campaign to rank within the top 3 spots for your target keyword.
To simplify things, I’ve created a free tool that allows you to instantly see the links needed to rank for your target keyword.
Once you have a copy of this template, import your site’s backlink data and competitors’ – as new sheets.
Rename the tab based on the name of the domain.
In the “Link Root” column, change it to the sheet tab name (your domain and your competitors). If sheet names are correct, it’ll only pull relevant data from other tabs.
Finally, it will show you important insights based on the gathered backlink information.
Here are a couple of items you should notice quickly:
- “Links needed per month” – shows how many links you need to build per month to catch up with the average monthly links of your competitors. Change the timeframe depending on how many months you want to conduct your link-building campaign (e.g. from 12 months to 6 months).
- “Link Gap Against Each Competitor” – gives you the link gap score between you and each individual competitor (based on their monthly links).
- Dofollow Backlinks (on DR Buckets) helps you quickly assess links your competitors acquired (per buckets of Ahrefs’ DR). It gives you an idea of what range of Ahrefs’ DR to focus on in your link building campaign (and not second-guess it when starting).
Knowing how many links to build every month challenges your SEO team to focus on a strategy to hit the link goal. While you can’t one hundred percent do it, it’s better to have it than to wonder what to achieve every single month.
Discover and Analyze Valuable Link Opportunities
One of my favorite tasks in competitor backlink analysis is scanning the lists of links to sites/competitors to see if I can find any interesting patterns, insights, or ideas.
The main point is that you should look for any type of page or link that has occurred on many of the backlink profiles you assess. This would uncover a strategy that, through proper execution, can help you land multiple links.
To make things easier, combine your competitors’ backlink data (exclude yours).
You can combine a group of CSV files into one using the Terminal app on a Macbook or a tool you search online.
You may also write a prompt on ChatGPT and upload the CSV files.
Once you have a merged file, remove the following columns that you may not need in your scanning process:
- Platform
- Referring domains
- Linked domains
- Content
- Nofollow
- UGC
- Sponsored
- Rendered
- Raw
- Drop reason
- Discovered status
- Lost
Then, delete these ones after filtering out the rows:
- Language – delete rows that aren’t “en” or “blank (unless you’re trying to scan non-English pages for an international link building campaign).
- Referring page HTTP code – delete rows with “404” or “403”.
- Lost status – remove rows that aren’t
Finally, you add a “Duplicates” column. For each referring page, we can see how many sites share the same referring page URL—this shows that it could be a resource/links page with links to all of your competitors.
For Duplicates column, add this formula: =COUNTIF(A:A,A2)
The next step is where you’ll spend most of your time, given that you’ll be scanning each page URL based on certain metrics.
To help you better understand how this works in real-life, I’ll show you different examples of competitor link analysis – for SaaS, eCommerce, and local businesses.
SaaS Example For Competitor Backlink Analysis
In this section, I’ll use the SaaS domains earlier as my example for competitors.
With their given backlink data, here are some interesting things I’ve found:
Backlink Analysis Technique #1: Duplicates + Filtering (Descending)
To see pages that are linked to 2 or more of your competitors.
The higher the number of duplicates, the more competitors’ links are included on the page. Without even browsing the page itself, a page with a higher external link count could mean that there are other sites it also linked out to (check column: External links).
Examples are roundup posts, links/resource pages, and group interviews.
In my SaaS example, we have some of the best roundup posts (Duplo Cloud, Ensuzo, Zluri, Scrut, Insight Assurance).
Direct and non-direct competitors and other publishers publish these roundup posts. This provides you with content insight: publish your own roundup post and make your software at the top of the list (as the best software for that category).
For backlinks, you may reach out to other publishers (of related roundup posts) and try to get included.
The more roundup posts that list you, the more visibility you gain, and the more likely that other publishers in the space will also include you in their roundups.
Backlink Analysis Technique #2: Homepage Links
By assessing homepage links, you’ll often find interesting link building tactics. One in particular, in our SaaS examples, is links from testimonials (homepage) and links from case studies. Examples are Vellum and Incident.
As soon as you gather patterns like this, you can also look at other similar link types. Search for page titles on your competitors’ backlink data using the keyphrase “case-studies”. It would reveal other case studies with Drata using other people’s products.
Link Building Tip: One good idea to test is to identify products and services your company has used, found satisfaction with, or has gotten results from. Offer your company a case study that the product/service can use for their middle-of-the-funnel content.
You’ll likely get a higher response rate, given that most SaaS are looking for case studies/results pages to showcase on their website.
eCommerce Example For Competitor Backlink Analysis
Let’s have an example in the eCommerce space.
We follow the same steps when performing a competitor backlink analysis. We chose a couple of competitors and exported their backlink data individually.
Backlink Analysis Technique #3: Filter By Ahrefs Domain Rating (Descending)
You’ll see the most authoritative domains by filtering links from highest to lowest Ahrefs’ DR. These are gold nuggets for high-tier link-building opportunities.
For example, we’ve seen high-tier publications that one of the competitors has acquired using expert commentary tips, which helps increase their thought leadership in the industry.
Backlink Analysis Technique #4: Filter By External Links (<50) and Descending
By filtering links with less than 50 external links on the page and sorting them from highest to lowest, you’ll see resource pages, products/category list pages, and directories where your online store can be included.
You can quickly find it on the sheet by filtering words in page titles, such as “where to buy” or “store.”
Backlink Analysis Technique #5: With Left and Right Context, Filtered by DR25+ (Ascending)
Scanning backlink data allows you to spot specific types of backlinks that count.
For instance, by using information on the Left and Right context of the anchor text, you can quickly see editorial links on the list (editorial links are links where the publishers link out to other resources within the page’s content).
These editorial links typically have surrounding words on the anchor text – within an article.
To spot them, filter out links with blank information on the left and right context. The remaining linking pages are most likely to be editorial links.
Local Business Example For Competitor Backlink Analysis
One last example is scanning for backlink data for local business competitors.
For instance, if I’m trying to do a competitor backlink analysis for pet clinics in London. I can start looking for other pet clinics in other regions, as they would open up new angles and insights for link building.
Below is a search result for the “pet clinic in Manchester” keyword.
First, when scanning, I avoid directory listings and local citation sites that rank for the local keyword. I’ll try to find local business competitors.
Then, I enabled the metrics bar in Ahrefs’ Chrome extension to see each website’s unique referring domains instantly (saving me from consuming much of Ahrefs credit).
I want to find domains with many referring domains (RD) because doing competitor backlink analysis for these sites is a goldmine for link opportunities.
Backlink Analysis Technique #6: “Find A” Directories and Citation Sites
In your scanning approach, you’ll undoubtedly come across a directory or listing site where you can submit your local business to be listed.
In general, most national business listings won’t positively impact your rankings. Most of these sites don’t have a strict or real vetting process for local businesses to be listed, so Google doesn’t value directory links.
However, there are a few niche directories where your local competitors are also listed. Check if these directories rank for a decent number of organic keywords using Ahrefs. If they do, spend minutes submitting your local business to them.
Also, find ones with a continuous vetting process in listings, like Pets Reunited – they remove fraudulent listings as soon as they receive scam reports and validate them.
Although it doesn’t carry as much weight as other link types, such as editorial and digital PR links, finding directories with good search traffic could help diversify your backlink profile.
Backlink Analysis Technique #7: Local Organization Finds
Other local links are local organizations, partnerships, and associations where your local business can be listed. Search them quickly on your backlink data sheet using “organization”.
You Don’t Have To Reinvent The Wheel
Regarding competitor backlink analysis, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Instead, analyze backlink profiles from similar businesses in highly competitive markets. Identify their strongest link-building strategies, extract the most effective approaches, and adapt them to your local landscape.
By continuously refining and applying these insights, you can build a robust backlink strategy that keeps you ahead of the competition.
The Author
How our LINK BUILDING AGENCY in UK builds 250 links/mo consistently using Predictable Link Building Methodology™…
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