How to Analyse Competitors’ Backlinks for SEO Gains

Benefits of Competitors' Backlink Analysis

Competitors' backlink analysis can provide numerous benefits that you can take advantage of:

• Identify link building opportunities – understand where your competitors are getting their backlinks from, enabling you to target similar sources to acquire your own backlinks, improving your authority and ranking
• Identify gasps in your strategy by analysing your competitors' backlinks to see where your backlink strategy is lacking, enabling you to make necessary adjustments
• Benchmarks – you can measure the strength and quality of your backlink profile against your competitors, understanding where you stand
• Identify trends in your industry – reveal trends in your industry including influencial bloggers and emerging websites

Importance of Competitors' Backlink Analysis

It is important to know your strengths and weaknesses, while understanding the landscape. When you analyse your competitors' backlink strategies you improve your own SEO performance. You identify new backlinking opportunities by examining your competitors links.

When you can track where you stand in comparison to your competitors, you can set goals and adjust your SEO strategy. You can identify the quality and volume of the backlinks you should be aiming for in order to gain a competitive edge. 

How to Analyse Competitors' Backlinks for SEO Gains

The Genie Crawl team have put together a few steps to help you analyse your competitors' backlinks for SEO:

Identify Your Competitors

• Know the difference between your direct business competitors and your online competitors. Online competitors, or search engine results page (SERP) competitors. Online competitors are those that rank for the same keywords you rank for
• Use Ahrefs or SEMrush to identify competitors based on rankings and keywords
• Select a mix of direct and online competitors to compile comprehensive analysis

Analyse Backlink Data

• Use Moz, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to gather backlink data on each competitor 
• Export the data to a spreadsheet, including domain rating, page authority, link type, and anchor text
• Assess the quality by focusing on the authority of the linking domains
• Understand the link diversity
• Look for high-value links

Identify Opportunities

• Identify common sources that link to multiple competitors
• Look for content gaps on your site, this is content that has acquired backlinks on your competitor sites
• Identify broken links in your competitors profile, providing you with an opportunity to suggest your content as a replacement

Conclusion

The insights you gain by analysing your competitor's backlinks can help you improve your SEO strategy when it comes to link building. You can learn, implement, monitor, and refine your SEO tactics to gain a competitive edge. Do you need help analysing your competitors' backlinks? Get in touch with the Genie Crawl team today.