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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A very well organized and in-depth article. Thanks Matthew.
No problem Mehdi!
What a nice & interesting article, thanks a lot for sharing it.We will consider ahrefs subscription to improve our website SEO. We are also checking excel SEO tools and they look great.
No problem 🙂
Hi Matthew,Thank you for the great post. It’s very helpful.What if many of the top 10 organic results for your keyword search link directly to your competitors sites?I doubt I can get them to list us.
That means its probably pretty easy to get them to link to you
I personally prefer Ahref tool because it show each and everything of competitor website. Thanks for the tutorial because I got more tools for testing.
No problem Arvind 🙂
Great article Matthew. Your article inspired me a new one is learning about SEO.Thanks.
No problem 🙂
Great article matt, It helps me a lot to get back linking sites of my niche. These are very useful tools for blogger.
Glad to be of service 🙂
Awesome post, Must be very useful for my blog.
I hope it is!
very helpful thanks Matthew Woodward
No problem Hamid!
Great read Matthew. Outstanding resource for small business owners – just straight to the point and actionable. Sick of reading about getting links organically – being a 1 man service business with content that would bore you to death makes it near impossible to create content of interest for people to then link too.My site which is a few years old, has a few links but not many of value. Currently ranking on page 1 but looking at my main competitors I’m still trailing behind with regards links – after doing my research with ahrefs. My site is better from a content and technical point of view – imho. I’m hoping by building some links I will be able to challenge the top 5. So to my question…I have a nice list of links I can acquire but given that currently I have amassed no more than 2 links in each of the last few years how should I approach the building process? Should I look at doing 2-3 a day or monthly or does it really matter? It’s a local service company I run if that makes any difference.Thanks for the invaluable information in what is a very secretive sector, mostly surrounded with fear of getting you site penalized.
Don’t worry about how many you can do, just do everything you can to acquire as many as possible.
Interesting… Ive always been a content kind of guy myself and totally rubbish at link building apart from doing a few social signals for each post (pinterest, twitter, facebook etc) – time to start driving a few links I think
You’ll see a huge difference when you do!
Thanks for this post….Good reads
No problem!
Yes backlink checkers will take some time to update their databases
I found the competitors back links as no follow but when I check on the back link checker mine says I have no back links does this take a while to update?
Most the backlinks are giving me nofollow links does this help?
Are your competitors backlinks form the same sources also nofollow?
Great post, Matthew. Will definitely try this out! By the way, how come you get such a huge amount of comments on every blog post? It’s insane lol
I guess because the content is helpful and I take the time to reply to people
AWEOME IDEA
Haha thanks!
Thank you Matthew, It’s a good idea to research backlink system
It is indeed, you can learn a lot 🙂
Thanks Matthew. This article should be read by all bloggers to stay updated. The ranking algorithms are changing frequently and one must be uptodate to survive the Internet world.
No problem Praveen!
its really awesome ..fantastic
No problem Hasan!
I host at one time on godaddy.com and for some reason google ad-sense paid me at an average $3.00 a click and I was ranking #1 position on google first page, where as suppose if getting $0.03 a click at a website hosting with lowest rankin, its not just checking back-links. its getting with a high ranking hosting network, like word press on google will rank higher than word-press alone, or if you integrate word-press in to a low ranking hosting company. and the good news I wasn’t building back-links yet, I was doing natural organic social sharing, start with that first will automatic rank you high. while people are paying for cheap hosting they fail to realize high rank hosting may cost as little as $25.00 per month website with a c panel that gives you access to the root directory, this is the first primary way to assure you have authority website and solid back links. many cheap hosting will not give you access to your root directory, they have there own onsite site builder which is OK if you like to push a sale or drive organic traffic or social traffic or referral traffic. but not good for authority because he who has control over your root directory will get the ranking position. so in reality you just modeling after someone own root authority directory website. it sort of like taping a thread to a car running 35 mph to your park car. over all guys these top rankers pay for the root directory rank coding position, which you have to insert the hosting company codes into your root directory, since I build a new website I will test this theroy here onhttp://gameofartists.com/ good luck
hiI use Traffic travis but some of the software you have mentioned dont cover Australia very well or at all eg Magestic. What do you recommend out of all those you have choose above as the best SEO competitor backlinks
Take a look at my SEMRush review which will do what you need
Thanks for sharing. I dont comment any website. It’s only logical that this way works (for years). But know that its really time consuming compared to basic methodes, like talking about your website to real people, sharing real paper flyers. You have to go all in! If you go for it, know you will have better rankings and more money, but less time to spend your life with friends and family. If you have nothing but all the time in the world, perhaps it’s worth it. If you go for it, you will have (for years) little time to spend your money and enjoy your life. I just had enough time to write this! We’ll i guess it makes sense so just go on now. Good luck and God bless you!
PBN’s are the strongest, most powerful type of link that you can build and Adwords budget does not correlate to rankings.
Thanks Matthew .Tthanks for sharing this post…so nice that you show different methods and tricks . I learned a lot from this post its really helpful to all. keep sharing …
No problem Ameeta!
Using Moz Pro I checked the Linking Domains of my competitor and found the top listing is .weebly.com with 512479 linking root domains. ThenI checked the Inbound Links and found he has a one page (400 words) blog created with Weebly using an url that ends with .weebly.com. Can that single blog link to 512479 root domains? The blog is really poorly written, And his site got to no.1 Google ranking because of that one Weebly blog.
Hello!Excellent your article. I always had doubts between Majestic and the AhrefsI think I’ll invest my long using Ahrefs, thanks for the techniques.
Yeah Ahrefs is much better!
But they have been at the #1 rank for at least two years. I thought Google disallowed PBN since 2014. However, I noticed the top four ranked sites under this particular Keyword are all heavy AdWords buyers, spending at least $2500 a month. Is there something fishy going on that we don’t know about?
thank you so much for this site
No worrys 🙂
A few tips & tricks I knew and some that I will be trying out and sharing with clients. Thanks!
No problem!
Hi Mathew,I used your method and found the backlinks and referring domains of my competitors who got 1st to 4th first page google ranking. I am on the bottom of the second page. The keyword was ‘Custom Home Builders’ which was quite a competitive keyword. I got the free Ahrefs trial and when I looked up one particular top competitor (www.jtfhomes.com), I found only 12 backlinks and 6 referring domains. Of the 12 backlinks, half of them were from its own website. The rest were from local business listings. In this billion dollar industry, how on earth did they get top ranking? Are backlinks that unimportant to Google?
It’s possible they are using private blog networks that are hidden from crawlers
Thank you Matthew by sharing good information to all SEO Lovers. We are expecting more tips from you.
No problem Svreddy 🙂
I daily spend more and more time on competitors’ site instead of on the sites I’m working on to rank! 😉 It’s my favorite tecqnique too! Good tips and advices!
The power of observation is the greatest super power 🙂
Nice Tips and Tricks provided.. Thumbs up bro.. No one do that now days, whatever you have done for newbies like us.This Will surely help in many ways. Link building , Backlinks analysis, Backlink tracking etc.. everything is great..
Thanks for your kind words, glad to be of service!
thank you very much for tutorial backlink competitor analysis. we’ve learn and hard work to this.
No problem 🙂
Thanks for sharing the nice update and advice …!!
Happy to help 🙂
This is the good information about back link analysis.This is the great process about increases the back link ranking..This is great information.
Glad to be of service Mohit!
Thanks for another great article Matthew. I was doing most of this already, but definitely picked up some good tips. Cheers !
No problem Carl!
Thank you so much for the tips! Those tricks are very handy and I will implement it soon and lets see how it goes.
Please come back and let us know how you get on!
We do not need tiers 2 & 3 as we are not juicing them up we are simply replicating them direct to our money site?
That is correct
First of all thank you for sharing in detail.However, some of the online tools you suggest has problems and they don’t match the results when you compare them.I give you sample: When I use Ahrefs, I get great result.Than when I jump on to Majestic..all kind of problems shows up.Like: crawl error-Title tag is missing.Also there is another tool you have not mention “Traffic Travis” there is pro and free version to start with.I will add this article to my SEO Book collection. because it is a treasure.Thanks again for the insight.
Take the inner URL of your competitor, plug it into a backlink checker and then replicate those backlinks?
None of the site’s allow submitting inner page URL. Do you mean export results using TLD and then from excel sheet filter required results?
this article is amazing. I have started a website so this information is very important for me.. thank you so much sujoy for sharing…
No problem, I hope it helps you!
This is way too good article. If you can add more to this or create a new post on how to steal backlinks of a inner page of competitor website that would be great.
Just do the same thing but targeting the inner page
Thank you so much for the tips! Those tricks are very handy and I will implement it soon and lets see how it goes. Great share, Matthew!
No problem Dion, glad to be of service 🙂
Fantastic post. Using Spyglass to get the backlinks then RC to replicate them in GSA. We are going to replicate these links direct to our money site. We are not going to use any form of web 2.0 buffer. Correct?Replicate them at a rate of 50 per day?We do not need tiers 2 & 3 as we are not juicing them up we are simply replicating them direct to our money site?Am I anywhere close?
Yes that is correct, just replicate them 1:1 and don’t worry about anything else
Hi Matthew,Gr8 article. Quick question :I am in the IT Support Services industry and looked at the backlinks of my top 3 competitors who rank high on page 1 for keywords like ‘IT Support City-Name’.Their backlinks seem to be coming from extremely irrelevant and even spammy websites (gambling, weight loss, comment spam etc).Would you recommend me replicating such links for my website as well? They are technically ranking with these irrelevant backlinks, but i’m sure i read somewhere that backlinks need to be from similar industry sources.Plz advise & again, thanks for the gr8 content.Regards
I would first replicate the relevant and the quality ones, then sit back and measure the impact before going after the irrelevant ones.
A really interesting article packed full of resources. Thanks.
No problem Gary!
Great insights. Thank you. I have been using Ahref which is great for stealing competitor’s links. I will certainly follow other which you have mentioned.
Mwahahahah it sure is!
Hi Matthew Woodward,I follow your blog, really this is very cool information’s, now I get competitors external links via your blogs information. Thank for sharing this kind information, if you have another blog regarding marketing so please update.