If you are having trouble finding competitor backlinks – don’t worry. We are here to help you by showing you our step-by-step guide on this topic. As always we feel the need to tell you that if all of this makes you feel overwhelmed or you have too much stuff going on with your website or your business in general you can always hire an SEO expert and let him or her deal with this instead of you. Finding competitor backlinks (and stealing them) is a very good way to get your audience to see your content and you should know that this is a very simple task for an SEO expert. Surely you will be very happy with the results.
Identify your main keywords
Target keywords are the crucial part of your strong SEO strategy and they are the best way for you to climb up the ranks on a search engine. You probably already know your main keywords but you should also use a keyword tool to understand which other keywords are most prevalent on your site. Here are our top three picks for you to check out :
- Ubersuggest
- Spyfu
- Morningscore
Use them to perform a keyword analysis on your website and that’s how you will identify your main keywords. This is just your first step.
Identify your competitors
You obviously need to know who are your main competitors but to see who your competitors are, you need to know how they’re competing. If you want to uncover these direct competitors, you must know every target keyword that contributes to your search engine visibility. We have already shown you how to identify your main keywords and show you the tools that will help you. Your main competitors will be the ones with a backlink profile that looks similar or just like yours. Try to do a “related” search on Google. This will show you your competitors. Here is a pro tip for you:
- Type: ” related:[your URL website] ” and the websites that pop up in a related search are or will be some of your domain-level competitors and you should do a quick research and get to know them a bit. Check out their websites.
But staying on top of your competitors is not the only thing you should be doing. You also need to keep educating yourself on this topic. SEO strategies keep changing and that’s why it’s important to find a reliable website like the Link Department where you can stay on top of all news in this field.
Analyze domain-level Competitors and investigate page-level Competitors by using a Backlink Checker Tool
You and your competitors need backlink building in your SEO strategy and there are stats that prove it. You will need backlink checker tools to help you analyze and investigate your competitors. We recommend using Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Moz Link Explorer. Those tools are very useful but you will need to pay to use their premium if you want fully to use their potential and to stay on top of your competitors. Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest ( the one we mentioned earlier in the text) is one of the best if not the best free quality backlink tools that can analyze the link profile of your page-level competitors.
Analyze Semantically Similar Keywords
Ok, so now you’ve gone through all your top keywords. Next, you’ll want to dig into semantically-related keywords. Some competitors will have a slightly or completely different SEO strategy to you, so it could happen that they do not appear when you’re searching your specific top keywords or key terms. That’s why it’s important to know all about SEO trends in 2022. Just use the same SEO tool as the ones we showed you above in the text and perform a search for each of your top keywords. This can and will show you the top pages that use similar keywords to yours.
Try to pinpoint the Top-Referring Sites
If you did everything we told you to do above you have collected all your necessary data by now. So, now the time has come for you to perform a deep-dive backlink analysis. That way you will scout out the most valuable referring domains.
Here is another pro-tip for you – steer clear of pages with high spam scores. They simply don’t sit well with Google and you surely know what that means. If you are not sure you can always read the webmaster’s guidelines to get a general idea. Instead of messing with spammy content, you should look for sites that have referred visitors most recently. But know that just because a site used to be a prominent backlink resource, doesn’t mean it is now and will be tomorrow. Try to explore backlink opportunities on websites that get high (organic) traffic and look for popular referrers within your niche.
Finding Competitor Backlinks and evaluating them
Not all backlinks are the same. They all have different values. Some of them can be very problematic. We are talking about toxic backlinks of course. Those are the ones that should be avoided at all costs. Organic backlinks are the best for you. But if you find some broken backlinks while researching your competitors you can benefit from them and get some great results. To put it as simple as possible you should look for reputable media sources but also influential leaders, and popular niche-related blogs.
Good luck with your SEO strategies
Hopefully, our guide to finding competitor backlinks has helped you a bit and now you know how to do it and also what tools to use. The tools we mentioned are a necessity and it will pay off to invest in them. Good luck!