Competitor backlink analysis is my favourite link building strategy of all time.
I have been using it for the last 10 years and it’s the only link building method that has stood the test of time.
With a simple competitor backlink analysis you can:
And then use them in your own strategy to outrank them.
Here is how to do it…
What Will I Learn?
Competitor backlinking is an SEO technique where you routinely analyse the backlinks of competing sites to see what types of links they have, how many, and the quality of links.
This is called competitor backlink analysis, and it helps you reverse engineer their link building strategy and use it for your own site. This will help your SEO and get you more traffic from Google.
Through this link profile analysis, you can get access to your competitor’s website performance from their number of external links and link metrics to their overall online authority – including page authority & domain authority.
A competitor backlink analysis helps you build (or improve) your strategy – the right way and allows you to:
Pretty cool, right?
Bellow, I’ll explain how to conduct this analysis to get great and fast results!
If you go to Google right now and search for your target keyword.
You’ll get on the first results page…
…The top 5x ranking sites that have all one important thing in common:
The idea of competitor backlink analysis is to-
Why waste time and money figuring out what works?
There’s already a proven link building blueprint out there waiting for you.
But to pull it off, you need a backlink analysis tool and you can get access to some incredible data without spending any money.
Before we do anything else we need to find all of the backlinks that are pointing to our competitor’s site.
Doing that is easy because we can take advantage of a number of tools that allow us to download all of our competitor’s backlink portfolio easily.
The 3x best backlink analysis tools on the market right now are:
They will return high numbers of links for every competitor website that you run through them. This is important because the more quality links you find, the more you can replicate!
Let’s take a closer look…
Ahrefs was the best tool on this list to find insight into competitors’ backlink profiles.
But in my more recent best backlink checker case study, they got absolutely blown away.
You can view all of your competitor’s backlinks (including their anchor text) in one dashboard thanks to Ahrefs Site Explorer.
You can then export them in a CSV file to form the foundation of your strategy.
Bonus: Ahrefs also allows you to monitor backlinks and set up backlink alerts so you can keep track of your competitor’s new backlinks!
The free SEMRush trial gives you access to a powerful tool with a very easy to use interface and relevant data sources that you can trust.
It’s certainly the best Ahrefs alternative out there to execute a backlink profile analysis.
But don’t be fooled by the high number of links it shows for my site.
SEMRush counts every link from a domain, but Ahrefs groups them together!
Either way, they give you a ton of data.
SEMRush has a freemium version of their tool that allows you to perform 10 data searches each day and you can also take advantage of a 100% free 14 day trial I set up for my readers.
Bonus: SEMrush offers the most comprehensive backlink audit you can find on the market.
See how Semrush stands against Ahrefs in my Ahrefs vs Semrush ultimate comparison.
SEO SpyGlass is the best desktop based backlink checker tool.
Although the link count is less than the last two tools…
It still gives you a significant number to work with:
However, their database is ever-growing with currently stands at 1.6x trillion links so it’s always going to find more than a handful for you.
SEO SpyGlass comes in two versions:
- Free: you can access data for 1,000x backlinks (but can’t export them)
- Paid: you can access data for unlimited backlinks and export them
But it doesn’t have an expensive monthly subscription like other tools.
Don’t worry, I understand these tools can be expensive if you’re starting out so feel free to take a look at my free seo tools list.
Honestly, you can’t make a wrong decision here. Each tool is going to provide you with more than enough backlink data to keep you busy.
And remember, if you are on a budget you can use the free trials to grab as much data as possible for your campaign.
| Ahrefs | SEMRush | SEO Spyglass | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $99/Month | $99.95/Month | $31.49/Month |
| Trial Available? | No. | Yes. 14 Day Trial & Freemium Model. | Yes. Freemium Model. |
| # Links Found | 69,600 | 1,600,000 | 35,500 |
But don’t do anything just yet!
First I want to show you precisely how we are going to use this data to grow our own search traffic!
Using the tools above I’m going to show you exactly how to steal your competitor’s links.
This is the proven repeatable method I’ve been using for years.
Better still:
Here’s what you need to do…
Your starting point is to get a list of the top #5 ranking URLs for your target keyword.
Select the keyword you want to target.
Then do a search in Google and make a list of the first 5x organic search results:
Your final list of URL’s should look something like this:
- https://backlinko.com/ecommerce-seo
- https://ahrefs.com/blog/ecommerce-seo/
- https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/ecommerce-seo/
- https://neilpatel.com/blog/seo-for-ecommerce-websites/
- https://www.shopify.com/blog/ecommerce-seo-beginners-guide
Head to this page to download my free competitor backlink analysis spreadsheet.
This is the intelligent sheet I have developed over the years for this specific task – you are going to love it!
Just paste the 5 links from step #1 above into column A on the first sheet-
Click on the “Click Here” links to automatically open the right report you need.
Export the data as a .CSV file.
You can export as much data as the tool will allow.
The more, the better!
Once exported, let’s put it into the tool…
Head over to tab #2 – Data in the sheet to Import each of the files you just exported.
The quickest way is to:
This is how you should do it:
Once you have loaded all the data you are ready for…
Head to Tab #3 – Plan Of Attack.
You’ll see a table of links.
These are the best competitors backlinks for you to target.
The tool has already:
That means in just a small amount of time you can put together a near-perfect link building strategy for your site.
(There’s that “keep it simple” motto in action again.)
That means it’s time to put your balaclava on and…
You have all of the actionable data you need to get started.
What you’re looking for in your Plan Of Attack tab is:
For example…
…If the link came from a blog comment, you’ll just need to write your own:
…if it was a forum post or a blog post, join the discussion and include links in relevant places:
…if it was a guest post, you’ll need to pitch your own for publication:
Take a look at each link and reverse engineer the process to figure out how to do it.
Just work through the Plan Of Attack tab and replicate each link – it really is that easy!
Stealing your competitors backlink strategies is one of the most effective ways to boost rankings and increase your traffic – including organic traffic & referral traffic.
It can save you:
By giving you an easy-to-follow blueprint that is proven to rank for your keyword.
To quickly recap:
This is the only link building strategy that has stood the test of time and it’s the first link building strategy I have applied on all of my sites for the last 10 years.
If you have any questions/thoughts about this strategy or if you need any SEO tips, please leave a comment below and I’ll be happy to help!
Just remember… Before starting building links, make sure you have read the full link building checklist that explains all the link building process.
Or, if you want to outsource it, check out my review of the top link building services.
Next I want to introduce you to resource page link building.
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Hi Matt,Why does linking out to the Top Ten increase the worth of your site in the eyes of google?Nofollow links?
Hi MattThanks a million for this amazing bit of information. It’s currently 1.20am and I have already started analysing my competitors back links. Fingers crossed this helps my laptop computer repair business. Out of interest is there anywhere where I can find a golden links database that’s already created…RegardsAAComputerZone
You should sleep :PYeah that golden links database is on the shelf right next to the stock market prices for the next year 😉
Hi Matt, another great post (as usual!)have you got any tips/suggestions of the best way to analyse the hundreds (or even thousands) of competitor backlinks for posting/backlinking opportunities (other than manually trawling through each one!)
Hi,Not just yet 🙂
Hi Rich,I think I found the solution, copy and paste all backlinks in SEO spyglass, then update the linkfactors for each link. This can take a while and some private proxies are recommended. When this is finished you can see the link strenght for each link and you can prioritize your link building efforts.
Hi Matt,Thanks for all those great tuts on online marketing, always keeps me ahead of the game :). Just one question what software do you use for making these awesome video’s?Thanks again Matt!Have a great weekend!
Hi Casper,I’m using camtasia studio and adobe after effects
Matt,I go up against large franchise companies that have tons of PR announcement back links. What do you suggest against these? Also what do you suggest about the david vs goliath task of being a local little guy against the big franchises.
Well thats the beauty of the internet, there is no david/goliath battle. Most large companies hire clueless SEO agencies so its fair game.But if your competition has lot of PR and press mentions – then you can do the same!
simply amazing! thanks a lot!!
No worrys 🙂
Then again I’m not doing anything different to most – its just HOW I do it that seperates.
Hi,Been following you for a long time now. I will be developing a link checker + monitor software myself. Let’s see if i can achieve those numbers (should try to atleast match spyglass as our sources are almost same). Anywho probably i will be posting my own income journey very soon. Hope to be featured on your blog.Regards,
Sounds great! Drop me a mail once you have got some income reports done!
Exactly what Matt said. Id also consider trying to get a yelp listing and local.yahoo listing of your clients to rank, that will possibly beat the competition for the local searches. They point to your clients info anyways and if a searcher sees great reviews they will likely go to your clients site or even call them from the listing. This will typically give your clients another bump in the results. You could end up being the top local listings and get the site to rank top underneath that.
My proxies are from Nick Crow an newipnow. Could it be that other people use the proxies as well or do I abuse em to much?
Yeah it could be that, or that the proxies suck in the first place.
Why I did’t come to your site earlier?So much time was wasted and for sure I am going to read each of your posts carefully.Thanks for all of your good work.
Hahaha thanks 🙂 Let me know if you have any questions!
Small SEO tools are free online backlink checker and also providing more services which are also free. I am using it and would recommend it.
They have pretty limited results in the test above though
Hi Matthew,Great post, but sometimes if your competitor use spam links or the website quality is basically sh*t there is no need to get the backlink from the same website, and sometimes it is easier to make your own list of topic related websites where you can publish guestpost or something.Look for Trustflow 15+ guys!
Hi,Thats true which is why we spend time looking at that before creating the link
That does make it a bit hard to differentiate yourself. I guess that’s why they say carving out your niche is important.
This is a great and insightful post, full of information that anyone new to SEO should be reading and doing over and over again.
Cheers Matt 🙂
Hi,So in essence what you have is a bunch of people doing the exact same thing as a bunch of other people?There is some serious risk there!
What Shawn said.1) content – see what your competitors are doing, do it better2) backlinks – do what your competitors are doing, do it betterAlso linking out to the top 10 will increase your rankings, it makes you more relevant and your page becomes the discovery hub for that topic at hand.
Thats for the heads up!
Hey Matthew,First of all, I’m a big fan of your blog!How many proxies do you use for scrapebox? I have made a list of 8.000 links going to my competition. But when I try to check if they are indexed my (private)proxies get blocked. Even if I set scrapebox at 5 sec interval.Thank for your help.
Hi,Who is your proxy provider?
Very Good.I use linkresearchtools for search bad links and the best links of other companys
How do you find it?
Hey Matt,Amazing post as usual.I do this too for new sites and its working wonders.This is something that is really good for peoples who are new to seo.
Its a nice way to begin learning the ropes with low risk 🙂
That was a freaking awesome article Matthew. I am trying to learn SEO and ranking my websites and today I learned a lot about stealing my competitors ranking and moving up the SERPs.Great work mate 🙂
Glad it helped you out =D
If Mr. William Rock disagrees with you on this one, which does he agree with you on? Tiered linking? One less competitor I guess
I think we’ll have to agree to disagree 🙂
In your Ahrefs screenshot I can’t see what setting you used for Ahrefs. It looks like you compared Ahrefs default domain counts with Majestic SEO and Opensiteexplorer default URL counts.This results I get for both settings:URL: https://searchlogistics.comMjseo:External Backlinks 2,832 Referring Domains 324 Referring IPs: 165 Referring Subnets: 147Ahrefs:Referring Pages 1,904 Total Backlinks 1,904 Referring Domains 218 Referring IPs 174 Referring Subnets 151 Opensiteexplorer:Total External Links: 885 Total Linking Root Domains: 212 Linking C Blocks: 109 Domains: matthewwoodward.co.ukMjseo:External Backlinks 24,650 Referring Domains 1,003 Referring IPs: 737 Referring Subnets: 640Ahrefs:Referring Pages 10,067 Total Backlinks 13,908 Referring Domains 1,091 Referring IPs 997 Referring Subnets 847 Opensiteexplorer:Total External Links 3,649 Total Linking Root Domains 403 Linking C Blocks 218
Hi,I just used the default settings
Hey Matthew,Great post. I used to use SEO Spyglass myself a few years ago until it started to really suck after Yahoo stopped offering up it’s backlink info.Now that you have recommended it I am tempted to give it another try.What do you think about the other software they provide in the full SEO Powersuite package they offer? I am currently using Advanced Web Ranking to track ranking which I’m happy with, but I’m wondering if it’s worth getting the full SEO Powersuite package that includes Rank Tracker, LinkAssistant and WebSite Auditor at £229.I doubt I’ll use the WebSite auditor, but wondered what you thought of the other tools.Thanks!
Hi,Well SEO Powersuite is one of the age old tried and tested tools and is a great suite for anyone. IMO the RankTracker is the best in the business!I also use link assistant for some out of the box stuff like https://searchlogistics.com/tutorials/how-to-automate-manage-guest-posting-video-tutorial/
Hello Matthew,I give this post a 5 star rating. It has taught me so many things I did not know of, thanks so much for sharing this post.Have a wonderful and successful week
Hey Matthew,Wow, that’s a heck of a lot of work. I was a little concerned as well if this is still as effective as in the past and then like Ileane had shared, how long does it take but reading through the comments and your responses I got my questions answered.I’m not that big on SEO but I will have a product launch coming up and would love to be able to rank pretty well for that so I’m keeping this in mind for that. Wow, I know I appreciate having read this so thank you for that. Great share…~Adrienne
Hi,Yes its a lot of work and pretty manual but its low risk and no cost 🙂
Depends which country you hire from ^^ Personally I always go to the Philippines
Hi Matthew,Very useful guide indeed, will surely try this method. Thanks a lot for sharing all the details.Cheers,Ruthanne
Hope it helps you out Ruthanne!
That’s a good point. I wonder how much something like this would cost. I imagine that you would have to put a candidate through a vetting process to make sure that they knew what they were doing as well.
As Matthew said, the idea is to create a solid foundation, so that you have the chance to rank. Also, many people won’t go through this rigorous process unless they have an SEO doing it specifically. That’s my two cents.
Hi Matthew, how’s there? This is Jerry from Malaysia and I just want to say thank you for blowing my mind away 😉 I am new for SEO and always tempted from those SEO tools out there like Senuke, Magic S… Do you think is a good idea to use these kind of softwares for our own money making site?Many thanks and catch up soon 🙂
Hi,Yes indeed – https://searchlogistics.com/tutorials/the-ultimate-guide-to-tiered-link-building-part-1/
Matthew,If I were anyone else I would totally agree with you. But I think I’m a special case. I’m in a niche of blogging about blogging and my friend Ana Hoffman has been teaching this strategy for a couple of years now. Since most of my “competitors” follow her and they follow me as well – I know that they are using this strategy. Because they are ranking for the exact keywords that she and I talk about all the time.Pat Flynn has been on the other side of the coin and so has my other friend Lisa Irby. That’s why they learned to be a little transparent about some of their newer niche site ideas. As far as any kind of “spinning” is concerned, that’s not something I would even consider.Thanks for all your advice and I’ll be sure to share this post with my networks.
No worrys!
In addition to that, you should check out these lies Dirk ^^https://searchlogistics.com/seo/link-building/zero-links/https://searchlogistics.com/blogging/how-to-start-blog-and-make-money/
Hmm, I just checked yours. You have some nice ideas, I should steal some. Just joking.I’m more for creating something unique. I love to discover new sources so I don’t usually steal from others. But stealing competitors rankings can be good for newbies. Nice post!
Hi,I’ll be honest I’ve never looked at the link profile of this site because of https://searchlogistics.com/seo/link-building/zero-links/Anyway its not stealing, its more investigating 😛
I see a lot of “deleted” links in Majestic SEO for my competitor. Is it not worth going after these?Also if my competitor has 600 links do I go after all of them (which would take a while) or should I start with 5-10 a week and see where it takes me?Thanks!
Hi,I would still try and get them if they look worth the punt but would but them on a lower priority.Just go after them as hard as you can 🙂
Cool man sounds great, thanks!
Then its likely you’ll need to build your own private network to compete!
Yes, exactly. Their own private network. What do you think?
Backlinkwatch does allow you to copy and past into excel like you mentioned. What if the URL is to long and it ends with ‘…’ just scrape it? Or is there a way to get it w/o a ahrefs account?
hey matthew not a place to discuss. But i need your advice for something. I pmed you on the forum.And this tutorial of yours is awesome. I always wondered how these seo guys talk about high pr links.. I used to wonder how they get these high pr links and then do seo. You are BETTER then matt cutts in seo!.
Hahaha don’t tell him that 😛
Hi Stephen,I would replicate links and then see where the land lies – sites like yelp get a nice natural boost from Google when it comes to local.I certainly wouldn’t shy away from getting more local citations and social signals.Forget about backlink numbers so much, its hard to measure in that way
Thanks for the response!1. His own website is ranking around the bottom of the page. The top 2 listings are general “Plumbers Austin TX” yelp, angies list and yahoo directory listings. I’m looking at his competitors on page 1 and will copy their backlinks. But I just can’t seem to outrank the generic yahoo, yelp and angies list rankings. Any ideas?2. Sorry my question kind of sucked. What I meant to say is it still important to get more links than a competitor? I plan on researching their backlinks and then replicating.Thanks again!
I understand this post is for unranked keyword pushes and affiliate linkage as you’ve produced similar in the past, however no gripe, just a query.What if your competition has no back links on the landing page?I have a customer with a niche product that has always ranked well and for a long time, everything is optimised discretely and gets good general back links and social media. However over the last 8 months it has gradually been over taken by rubbish info sites and old content. In fact all the eCommerce sites have dropped for the niche keyword (some rightly so).None of the competition have back links (except the Wikipedia) or produces much social media for their pages, even though their site homepages generally do. It almost seems that doing nothing on the site is better than something.. or my customer is getting dropped so they spend adwords cash 🙂
Hi,Actually its the first part of something much bigger but you’ll see in time :)Fire me over some more details in an email
When you say finding all of the backlinks for each of the top 10 results are you talking about the actual pages or the corresponding domains ?I am asking because i tried with ahref and majestic seo to find backlinks for a particular url and they found nothing.
The actual pages :)Sometimes you will find nothing – are you finding nothing for the entire top 10 though?If you are, well you are more than onto a winner there!
Hi,Well I can be 99.9% confident that most of your competitors wont be using this tactic as people are generally fixated on using tools/networks they can’t see the wood for the trees.Is this a lot of work compared to manually spinning a bunch of content to use with software? This is the easy shortcut ;)I would first use this to create a competitive foundation then depending on where you sit on the risk scale leverage that with additional link building which might be gentle guest posting or all out blog network spam.
Haha 😉
Fuckyeah!
Great article. Thank you for sharing these links and the strategy of how to apply them to analyze the top rated sites.After a quick run-through with just one or two URLs I do notice a pattern. Much of the content is paid posts, links, or content (e.g. linkspam). No wonder I can’t find anything useful using google :PAs Catherine mentioned, .ru sites seem to be pretty popular. So does link spamming and then removing the backlinks.
Hi Jay,Its what you do with that information that counts 😉