A competitor link study evaluates the link profiles of significant rivals, examining their link development tactics to get valuable insights. By using some of the same techniques in your link building, you can improve company results and search engine rankings.
By conducting this type of analysis, you can identify websites that frequently connect to your website. If you see that rivals with higher rankings have a high percentage of similar connections, these links can be contributing to their ranking.

Let's examine how to carry out a fundamental audit. I'll demonstrate later how to extend this procedure to use larger data sets to obtain even more insights. 

Competitor Backlink Analysis: What Is It?

One of the best SEO strategies to help you get to the top of Google's search results is building backlinks.

However, how can you be certain that you're surpassing your rivals?

The term competitor backlinking refers to the research of your competitor's link-building strategy and overpowering it.

Competitor backlinking is an outstanding SEO tactic that lets you nit-pick the links based on their quality, authority, and types as well as how many backlinks you need.

This way you can build a more profitable link-building strategy for your site.

Consider giving backlink outreach a try. It’s the most promising and preferred link-building method. All you have to do is reach out to the potential referral websites. Feel free to reach out to reputable SEO agencies in the UK, US, or Canada, or consider experienced virtual assistant companies like MyTasker. These professionals can provide effective link-building tactics to bolster your trustworthiness in the digital realm.

You can contact websites that are more effective at referring people by examining their backlink profiles. Alternatively, you can utilize a backlink checker tool to examine the backlink profile of your competitors.

There is a two-pronged attack method that can help with this research.

You should focus on researching two types of competitors:

1. Page-level competitors
2. Domain-level competitors

Page-level Competitors

Page-level competitors are those websites that target the same keywords to rank as one of your web pages.

However, these webpages might not offer similar services as you or want to target your targeted audience, but some individual pages do instead of the entire website.

Domain-Level Competitors

Domain-level competitors are websites that offer the same services as well as target the same audience as you do. Basically, they are in the same industry as you.

So, naturally, their targeted keywords are the same one but for your whole website.

4 Ways to Analyze Competitor Link Analysis

1. Find Your Competitors

You wish to ascertain the identities of your rivals. Using the term you want to rank for in a Google search is one quick approach to finding out. Assuming you own a plumbing company in New York, you might look up "Plumbers in New York City" online to find out who your rivals are.

When the directories are taken out, you are left with a list of competitor businesses. The directories can come into use for Citation Building in the future.

Use distinct terms and phrase varieties to repeat the search. Make a list of your top ten or at least your top five competitors.

As previously noted, you can automate all of this using a variety of premium SEO solutions, such as SEMrush. Simply type in your domain name, and it will get a list of your rivals along with all of their backlink profiles and your top keywords. Investing in paid tools can help you save a ton of time and simplify the process overall.

However, you don't need to utilize one of those expensive SEO competitor analysis tools to obtain a sense of your competitors by following the preceding step.

2. Use Backlink Checker to Analyze Domain-Level Competitors

Domain-level competitors should be your main focus point and using a backlink checker can make this analysis easy.

Because these websites belong to the same industry as you, you should learn which one of their referral websites is most promising and add it to your backlink strategy.

Fortunately, several tools are available to conduct this research like Ahrefs, SEMrush, etc. But these are not free, you need to buy their plan to use their services.

Moz Link Explorer can be of use if you want to save money. Even though it offers a premium option, it lets you find out the top links of your competitors for free. Because you only need to find out your competitor's top-performing backlinks, this tool would be sufficient for your requirements in the beginning.

Always choose links with higher authority, that offer useful and relevant information and are trustworthy in general.

On the other hand, avoid choosing links with a low score for spam. Some of the features of the high spam score links are not banned by Google, that’s why picking those sites would completely defeat your link-building strategies.

3. List the Competitor Backlink Profiles

Creating a spreadsheet for your competitor sites and their links would give you an easier approach to the link-building process. Or, you can craft a master list enlisting all your competitors’ incoming links and then delete the duplicate ones.

You can use a spectacular free tool from Searching People to automate this chore. All you have to do is put the competitor’s website link to the search bar and press the “Get backlink data.”

The page will load to loads of sites and their backlink profiles as well as useful metrics. You can see the URL list specifying the domain and its internal web pages by scrolling down.

You can also refer to the ‘LIS’ column. LIS is short for Link Influence Score. This tool calculates this score based on the link quality and the number of links redirecting to the website. If the quality of the inbound links is higher, the LIS score will also be higher. The free tool would let you export the results. So, you can buy their plan to make this process easier.

4. Get As Many Links

Now that you know how to identify the best backlink profiles, it’s time to steal them for your own. If you have found high-authority and efficient backlinks, you can try to get links from those sites.

All you have to do is analyze the links to comprehend the strategy used to obtain them by your competitors. This is a very easy process as you can figure it out just by looking at the link.

After the technique identification, you can use the same technique to acquire links for your site. If it was from a blog post, you can offer to write another one for their site. If it was coming from a comment, you can approach to write a comment for that will make their post more valuable.

In short, whatever the technique is, try to approach the same method for your link-building strategies.

It’s important to mention, that you might not be successful in adding all your competitors’ backlinks, or it might need more legwork from your side. For example, you might have to write a more meaningful blog with the latest resources than your competitors did to gain a link from a specific site.

To Conclude

No matter how high-ranking a website is, they will always have one thing in common with the other top-ranking sites and that is their link-building strategy.

All these top sites are regularly optimized for an increased page load speed and higher conversion. Moreover, they also offer the most trustworthy information to their readers. Even though all these facts work in their favor, a substantial backlink profile is the main driving factor in achieving online success.

Let MyTasker help you build the most efficient backlink profile for your website. With the experience and knowledge of our SEO expert, acquiring high-quality backlinks is as easy as adding products to your shopping cart. If you are starting from scratch, we can assign a virtual SEO expert to take full control of your website’s digital marketing section to beat your competitors in the ranking game. Try our exclusive trial today and see the MyTasker difference for yourself.