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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Wow this is one of the best articole about backlinks competitor analysis… I learn a lot and i will apply all I learner here. Thanks!!
No problem 🙂
The techniques are simple but very useful.
Hope they help you out!
Hey Rob,You came to my site to ask my expert opinion on an SEO question you had.For me to answer you comprehensively, I asked you a question – which you didn’t answer and instead branded as ‘irrelevant’.When you ask someones expert opinion and they have a very specific question – it’s probably not irrelevant in the experts eyes that you are asking for help.With that said, I can’t help you any further as you already have all of the answers apparently.Thanks
Hi Matt, is there a tool or a way to check quickly T2 backlinks of competitors?Those would be backlinks that point to backlinks that point to money site. This can give way bigger picture and reveal tiered strategy of a competitor.Thanks
Unfortunately not =/
That’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is one website has over 4000 back links using only 2 variations of anchor text. “web design X” and “website design X” (X being the location) and nearly every single one is from a footer link.The website is placed in position 1, page 1 of search results for both phrases. The real kicker here is, I’m trying to rank higher in location Y but, because there are so many instances of “web design” and “website design” linking to their site that 1, yes, just 1 instance of the word for location Y in their home page also places them in position 5 on page 1 for location Y as well. Not one of their back links text is “web design Y” or “website design Y” and yet they appear higher than me who has many text links that include Y.It has to be the numbers. An algorithm is a numeric based calculation and google’s mystical algorithm is no different. I used to be a technical assistant to a life insurance actuary that wrote the algorithms which provided estimated maturity values for polices at investment growth rates of 5%, 10% & 15% and they don’t use alpha data to provide a result. It’s numeric. An algorithm is a very complicated, mathematical equation that processes numeric information to reach a result, not alpha.After seeing the back links of my competitors I instantly questioned how they survived penguin and, knowing the logic of how algorithms work and the fact they use numeric data to produce a result, it has to be the numbers. When someone types “website design X” in to a search engine the algorithm has to produce a definitive list of results and those results have to be based on a number. The feeds which provide the information in order to produce that number might have been gathered by crawlers and bots which read alpha data but, whatever cached data is drawn from when displaying a list of results, the site which appears at number 1 has to have the most number of instances of the keywords stored in the cache.Let’s say there are 10,000,000 instances of the phrase “website design X” in the cache. If there’s a website with 5,000,000 of them linking to it, it’s going to be on the top spot. If that site only has instances of “website design X” linking to it, it also makes it the most relevant. Therefore:4000 instances of “website design X” + “web design X” = 1 i.e. position 1 for location X And4000 instances of “website design” + “web design” + 1 instance of Y = 5 i.e. position 5 for location YBased on the back link data I gathered using SEO Spyglass, SEMRush, Aherfs, Majestic SEO and Backlinkwatch of the other 9 websites appearing on page 1 for search phrase “website design Y”, I conclude they occupy those positions due to the very high number of links containing very limited but very relevant text. if it mattered where the links came from or whether they are dofollow or nofollow, which seems to be of little consequence, they would have lost their rank and been relegated to lower pages by now.Not only that, I put my conclusion to the test about a month ago and started changing the footer links in my client’s websites so they are all “website design Y” and not a jumbled bunch of permutations to try and look natural and my site moved up from position 8 to 6. If that isn’t due to the higher number of specific, relevant links to my site then I’d like to know what did cause the increased SERP.
The flaw in all this is if your competitors are website designers but the top 10 results for keyword phrase “website design +location” happen to have virtually all of their back links coming from site wide footer links in their client’s websites. It doesn’t give you anything to go on because you can’t mimic (mimic is a far more appropriate term than stealing because you can’t steal search engine ranking of another site) what they have done unless you build loads of client websites using wordpress.And, before anyone starts screaming ‘Penguin’, before reading this article I spent months looking into what my competitors do and trying to replicate their strategy in exactly the same way as described here but couldn’t because of links from client websites. Nothing you can do about supposedly ‘stealing’ those!I analysed the back link profiles for the other 9 websites listed on page 1 and all of them seem to be totally unaffected by Penguin. No diversity in the anchor text distribution for that all important ‘natural look’ that everyone goes on about and more site wide footer links than you can poke a stick at.Makes you wonder what exactly Penguin does do and what sites it does it to!!!
Are the links dofollow or nofollow?
Hey, thank you for this tutorial! Well done!
Thanks Davide 🙂
Hi Matthew thankyou so much for this article. We are in the process of redesigning our computer repairs website and getting more and more local content, blog articles services pages written etc to keep the organic seo side happy. We currently sit on the top of page two for our particular keyword computer repairs brisbane. We are really keen to get some link building going as we have never really done this and managed to get some good business through targeted suburb pages. Link building is the next step for us, it seems that having great content alone cannot win the battle. This was a great article and glad to see it is active and alive after a few years. Cheers
Well, I would start with this https://searchlogistics.com/seo/local-seo-guide/
This is just an terrific article about how to Legally Steal Your Competitors Search Engine Rankings. Even I am doing from past 6-8 months. In starting even I faced difficulty in ranking my site. This is I feel something best thing to just check the competitor list. And I feel Ahrefs and SEMrush are the best tools in providing the required information.
Please come back and let us know how you get on Rosy!
New to SEO like saga vyas but this has really help. More strength…Waiting for more from you.
No problem Oge, keep on growing 🙂
Quite funny really, I followed a competitor’s link and found this page.
Hahah inception 😛
Hello sir,I am quite new to SEO, and came to know about competitor analysis. I Googled it and I found your post. It was a worth reading post and as for the free tools, I found Small SEO Tools more efficient. But One question…how can I subscribe to your newsletters??
I’m glad it helped you out 🙂 You can do that in the sidebar
I read all the articles and they are really impressive. I’m new to blogging, but these articles really help me a lot. Thank you Matthew
No problem Pasan!
Hi Matthew!This is an awesome strategy.I have finalised on main keyword for my site and top 20-30 search results are filled with e-commerce sites. And the ranking inner pages of these sites do not have even a single back-link ! So, will it be easy to rank with fresh new domain ? Since my competitor do not have any back-links and its scarce to find blogs in this categoryAnd yeah, KC according to Long tail pro is 16Thanks, Waiting for your answer 🙂
Yes you could go for that, but there is more to niche research than just finding a keyword that is easy to rank for. You don’t want to set your ceiling too low 🙂
Hi MatthewI really appreciate your efforts, as I’ve been looking for this guidance for months and I asked a lot of smart guys to help me but they didn’t bother to answer. Anyway, I got a huge list of my competitor’s backlinks, clicking and opening them, when I try to create backlink for my own page, I don’t see any option at these links. 10-15 backlinks (page) that I visited had no option to create any sort of backlinks.Do you know what to do in this case?
Yes just review it yourself and make a decision on what to do, maybe its a web 2 so you can create a web 2. Maybe its from a feature/editorial so you can contact the site owner and do your own deal. Maybe its just a link from a private blog network so you can build your own network etc etc
This is superb. I have been looking at a strategy for building backlinks and didn’t know where to start really, but this has spelled it out nicely.Matthew, do you do this as a service. ie can I hire you? I love doing this stuff myself but time is scarce at the moment so im looking to outsource some of my admin / seo etcIf so can you send me a mail with rates etcWill be bookmarking your blog for future ref.
Hey Greg,Sorry this isn’t something I would do but you can find someone to complete this kind of work easily on a site like elance etc
Plz Matthew I have this blog I’ve been trying to get genuine back links for a long time now, give me some advice
Thats a great steal for my blog.
Yoink 😛
Awesome tutorial, despite of its useful information I really enjoy reading, Thank you, I just started making a website. 🙂
No problem glad to be of service 🙂
Ok well I would focus at a domain level and top category level (assuming you have taken care of internal linking and content to upport that) which then drives authority into the other pages/product pages.How does your levels of content compare to your competitor?
Ideally I would like to generate lots of backlinks to various pages on the site, but about two thirds of competitors best links are unobtainable, due to – sponsored links, paid site, interview with CEO etc. So of the third I am able to capitalise on, I was checking to see if it’s best to boost the DA of the home page, because if i send a sporadic selection of links to product and/or category pages it may dilute the link juice?The nice is flooring, we sell and deliver flooring. The other company I looked at has the same DA as us,, but a lot of their keywords are outperforming ours. Out site is as good as if not better UX wise, it is faster via page speed and y slow, all pages are indexed in google, and overall we have much more links and of general better quality than them. It is a big mystery on how they are doing super well? The website isn’t exactly old either. This is where I need yours or others (if they are reading) expert advice??
Thanks For sharing your information sir,this is very informative and helpful.surely will try it soon.Thank you
No problem Abdul 🙂
Hi Matt. Thank you for a very useful information you’ve shown to us. I very appreciate your work ^^ But i have a question that is this strategy still useful today? Hope you will reply me ^^ Thank you and keep going bro :p
Yes, think about what you are actually doing with this strategy and you will understand that it is timeless.
Thank you, I just started making a website about programming, I will try to use it on my website. I hope I will get many backlinks with this.
No problem, I hope it goes well 🙂
Hi Matt,Have been trying to implement this recently. Would you suggest that when posting links in forums/guestblogs/comments etc that we link to our home page, or category/product pages instead. It’s an e-commerce site.Can you also shed some light on why some sites sites seem to rank well, when they don’t have many backlinks. I have thoroughly analysed their site speed, structure, content, keywords etc and nothing out of the odinary comes up. Is there any ways to check if they use PBN’s or other grey/black hat techniques? I have seen this question asked before, but hasn’t been a clear response really.Would really appreciate your expertise on this.
Link to wherever you want to link to based on your current SEO goals.Which sites in which niche?
Thanks for this great post, I’m going to implement it over this weekend to bump up the backlinks to my website.Any pro tips from people who have used this technique recently?Thanks and have a nice day
I use it on every new site I launch, and there isn’t really any secrets to it.
Thank you Matthew this is one of the best articles i have seen on link building, i have taught of something like this previously but your article shed more light.i hope to see result in no time
No problem 🙂
Great article, I am just beginning the process. I am just wondering how many links I can add each day without alerting google? (or would they even care as the links arent from PBN’s), also apologies if you’ve already answered this i’ve flicked through the comments and couldn’t find an answer.
How many per day isn’t important but set a weekly or monthly target and then make sure you meet that target consistently
I just tweaked the strategy and this is what I do and it’s paying off for my clients. I respect Matt and his writeup gave me initially the right frame of mind to try this. After lot of playing with backlink strategies I came up with below strategy.First identify below.x3 Low Competition Keywordsx2 Low/Medium Competition Keywordsx2 Main keywordsSearch google for keywords and identify TOP 5 websites ranking for keywords.- Use Spyglass and ahrefs to extract backlinks for top 5 websites for all keywords I am going to target- Use GSA platform to identify the platforms of backlinks- Based on Platform Identification use the GSA search engine ranker to run campaign for imported backlinks of TOP ranking sites for keywords- The key to success using GSA SER is that you should use (Private proxies + DeathbyCaptcha + GSA captcha breaker + Unique content (wherever required) + 20 emails (depending upon number of backlinks) or use your domain email address(which is best option)- After backlinks are complete sit back and use indexing service to index the backlinks – I also use GSA indexer to some extent but I prefer paid one.- That’s it. I am missing small things but I have mentioned almost everything.Matt do you want to add anything to it!!
Great process that is easy for anyone to implement 🙂
Hardeep how are you setting up GSA?Are using one tier and sending the backlinks direct to your money site?I am fully set up on GSA I am just not sure of the best way to set up this specific task of replicating the backlinks.
This is a great guide. IS there a way of getting it in a printable PDF?
Not at the moment sorry
View source and search for the domain to see where it is first
just again wonder…what a neat & clean concept for building backlinks. Keep following your blog to steal your knowledge, off course Legally!Indeed, Great post.
Mwahahahahaha haha =D
Thanks for the free tools will definitely let you know how it goes.
No problem 🙂
You need to watch my free training videos here http://marketerseal.com/
Quick update: I found the competitor I’m after has a private blog network. I thought Google was penalizing PBNs?
This backlinks tutorial is all I need. Killer content alone just doesn’t work. I’ve always wondered why those ‘small’ websites rank on first page with nothing special.Downloading SEOSpyGlass as we speak..
No problem Harrison
Hi Matthew, most of the link checker sites are asking for payments. Arrrggh.
Fancy having to invest in your business, crazy!
Can you please advise how important the url/ meta description length is? We have around 2000landing pages. 800 of them has +75characters on the url. 1100 of them has more than 150 characters on meta description. These pages were indexed by google 9 months ago. Do you think it is wiser to change the urls from the beginning and wait them to be indexed again or leave it as it is? We really can’t decide. Thanks in advance
Just make sure they all have a unique title and meta description
Great article! I am currenly using free version of Ahrefs but it was showing up to 10 urls. I checked majestic after reading your article and the free version seems much better than Ahrefs!
Yes for checking your own site Majestic gives you a bit more
I just used some of these backlink checkers website,some of them I did not heard it,thanks for all this info .I just started to use them.
No problem Mario!
Nice layout here for the newbs like me. I was doing a little keyword research today for some niche ideas and saw that some people were ranking in the top 3 results with only 3 backlinks. How is that possible?Last night I was all set to buy GSA and a keyword tool, but then I saw that and it made me wonder if backlinks are really that important anymore.
Are those inner pages on authoritative domains?
thank you
No problemo 🙂
Hi Matthew, we meet again.I have an extensive list of 2 of our main competitors backlinks. Over 800 in total. Using the SourceTrustFlow/SourceCitationFlow = Trust Ratio or is it better to reference the DomainTrustFlow/DomainCitationFlow = Trust Ratio.Upon research I have discovered that ratios above 1 are non spam.A lot ofthe ratios which are above 1 do have lower source trust and citation flows – such as 8/7, it has a ratio above one but should I try and replicate as the absolute numbers are so low?
I would replicate anything that is up to 2
very very goodThanks…
No problem 🙂
Is this strategy still working? How much ranking boost can it offer? And is it long term and white hat?
Yes this strategy will never die
Will there not come a point when everyone is copying their competitors backlinks, surely its more ethical and organic to acquire ones own and grow your site with great content that people want to share
Yes that would work as well. Takes a bunch more time and money but it would work!
No problem Vineet glad it has helped you out!
Nice information about dofollow i have learn now more
No problem Tiska 🙂
this was quite nice information…thanks admin for this amazing article
No problemo 🙂
thanks info, i will do it
Good luck =D