How to Research Your Competition Link Building Methods

Written by Michael Bass

Building back-links is a fundamental part of good SEO practices. Gaining high-ranking backlinks can help increase organic website traffic, allowing you to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. There are many different strategies that you can use to build backlinks. But, one of the most effective solutions is to research your competition. Find out what methods they are using to gain back-links.

Here are some simple tips that you can use to research your competition and their methods for link building.

There are four steps to research your competition link building strategies:

Make a list of your top competitors
Use tools to find their back-links
Analyze their back-links

Make a List of Your Top Competitors

First, you’ll need to make a list of your top competition. If you don’t know who your competition is, then you have some work to do. You’ll need to perform a search query for keywords related to your products or services. Visit the top sites that offer similar products or services.

You’ll want to learn more about these sites. In the next step, you’ll use tools to find their back-links. But, you’ll first need to make sure the site is worth exploring. To do this, you’ll need to find out how much traffic they receive. You can use Alexa and other website domain tools to determine traffic volume.

Begin compiling a list of your top competitors. Focus on 4 to 6 of your top competitors.

Use Tools to Find Their Back-links

The next step is to find the back-links to the websites of your competition. There are numerous tools that will explore back-links of other websites. This includes:

Majestic SEO
Ahrefs
Open Site Explorer

Choose one of these tools and enter the domain of one of your competitors into the web-based program. Look at their external back-links and the total number of unique domains linking to the site.

Download a CSV file or make your own list of the back-links with the greatest authority. Also, pay attention to the anchor text that they’re using to link to these sites. Focus on the anchor text that is relevant to your industry.

Analyse Their Back-links

After you have a list of back-links, it’s time to analyse them. Find out if your competitors have any linking domains in common. These are sites that link to more than one of your competitors. Make a separate list of all the linking domains that your competitors have in common.

Take your list of common domains and research them. Use a PageRank checker to find out the authority of the back-link. You can also find this information from the tools listed above.

You want to find the domains with the highest PageRank. Next, visit the linking URLs. Find out why these sites are linking to your competitors to determine if there is an opportunity for you to gain a back-link.

As you start visiting these sites and following the URLs to the linking domains, you’ll begin to learn more about your competition and how they build back-links.

If they rely on guest blogging, you should start guest blogging. If they rely heavily on social media links, you should focus on your social media marketing campaign.

The goal of analyzing your competition is to gain a sense of which techniques they use to build back-links. If you want to succeed, the easiest way to get ahead is to find what already works for someone else and adopt a similar approach.

Start building links more efficiently. Implement these suggestions into your SEO strategy.

Along with these tips, receive even more beneficial online marketing ideas, by checking out my done-for-you system.

Image Sources:
Manzoor, A. (Posted: November 21, 2016). Image of analyzing back-links: 5 Best SEO tools to analyze backlinks. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-best-seo-tools-analyze-backlinks-manzoor-aman
Pascoe, M. (Posted: July 22, 2016). Featured image: How to research your competition. Retrieved from http://www.thebusinesswomanmedia.com/how-to-research-your-competition/
Servando, S. (Updated: December 9, 2012) Image of finding competitors’ back-links: How to find competitor backlinks and why you want to do it. Retrieved from https://stream-seo.com/find-competitor-backlinks/