Mastering Competitor Backlinks: How to Find and Replicate Them

Building backlinks is an essential part of improving your website’s visibility and ranking on search engines. Analyzing the backlink strategy of your competitors can serve as a very good starting point for a link-building plan.

Finding how your competitors got their links can reveal possible opportunities to utilize the same link-building strategies, discover weaknesses in their link profiles, and build a better SEO strategy.

In this article, we are going to teach you how to find, analyze, and replicate your competitors’ backlinks while giving you actionable tips that can help strengthen your SEO strategy.

Table of Contents

Why Competitors’ Backlinks Analysis?

Competitor link analysis serves as the way for you to get an idea about their strategies that highlight opportunities for your website. This is the reason why analyzing competitors’ backlinks is such an important thing:

Effective Tactics: Learn what works in your industry and deploy similar strategies.
Find Opportunities: Look for directories, guest post opportunities, and niche-specific websites linking to any of your competitors but not to your website.
Formulate a Better Strategy: Learn from their mistakes, repeat their successes, and create an approach that best fits your goals.

How to Uncover Competitors’ Backlinks

First things first- to get started, you are going to have to have an SEO tool that will help you discover your competitors’ backlinks. Here’s how you can do that with two methods available:

The Free Method: Ahrefs’ Free Backlink Checker

If you’re on a rather tight budget, get yourself started with Ahrefs’ free backlink checker:

Open the Ahrefs Backlink Checker.
Type in your competitor’s domain or a particular URL.
Go through the top 100 backlinks, referring pages, anchor texts, and target URLs.

This way, it gives some kind of idea but limits the number of shown backlinks.

Paid Way: Ahrefs’ Site Explorer

If one wants to go deep into the analysis, then a paid subscription with comprehensive data looks something like this:

Log in to Ahrefs and insert the competitor’s domain into Site Explorer.
Go to the Backlinks report to see all the backlinks, anchor texts, referring pages, and domain authority.
Filter results to get only high-authority domains in your native tongue or with a certain anchor text.

With the complete toolset under Ahrefs, you’re able to analyze every single backlink and extract all sorts of insights from them.

Who Is Your SEO Competition?

Sometimes, your organic search competition is not always your business competition. It simply means those websites ranking for the keywords you target.

How to Find SEO Competitors:

Put your domain in Ahrefs Site Explorer.
Open Organic Competitors report, and you will see who ranks for similar keywords.
Target your target keywords with Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer if your website is new, then find the report Traffic Share by Domain to identify competitors dominating search results.

How to Replicate Competitors’ Backlinks

You can’t replicate all backlinks of your competitors but you can focus on replicable ones, effective tactics and opportunities to “steal” links. How? Just follow these steps.

Find Easily Replicable Links

a. Directory Links

Also, directory links are so easy to replicate and give that little kick you need for your local SEO rankings. To find directories,

Take Ahrefs Link Intersect tool.
In Target, insert your homepage; in sources, insert the competitors’ homepages.
You want to find directories that link to your competitors but not to you.

Once identified, submit your business to the relevant directories. Don’t pay for directories unless they have value outside of SEO, too. ‪

b. Listicle Mentions

In case the competitors were mentioned in any listicles, for instance, “Best Tools for selling [X]”, pitch for inclusion:

Using Ahrefs Content Explorer to find where your competitors have been mentioned, use this query:

“Competitor 1” “Competitor 2” “Competitor 3” -“Your Business Name

Find listicles relevant to your niche and pitch authors for inclusion. Example:

Hi [Author’s Name], read your article on the best [tools/restaurants/etc.]. Noticed [Your Business Name] wasn’t included. Be glad to provide more info or free trial if interested.
Best, [Your Name]

c. Guest Posts

Guest posting is among the most effective link-building tactics. To find your competitors’ guest posts:

Search in Ahrefs’ Content Explorer for content having authors from their marketers in the format of:

Topic + author: “Competitor’s Author Name”
Pitch similar guest posts to the same websites.

Competitor Link Building Tactics to Exploit

If competitors are getting links through certain tactics time and again, then mirror the strategy. Examples include:

a. HARO

Reporters and bloggers use HARO consistently in order to find quotes; in return, they will link back.

Identify links from HARO with Ahrefs’ Backlinks report:

Filter for anchor text or surrounding text contains and add quotes in there.
Answer relevant journalist requests through HARO for similar backlinks.

b. Linkable Assets

Some of the strong assets that competitors have gained links for include statistics, tools, or research. For example:

Make good use of the Ahrefs’ Best by Links report to identify competitor web pages that boast the maximum number of referring links.
Seek link-worthy assets-hot and fresh studies or useful tools that you can create to replace.
Use internal linking to pass authority to your main pages.

“Steal” Competitors’ Links

a. Broken Link Building

Broken link building means finding dead pages that have links pointed to them and creating similar contents, proposing link replacements.

In Ahrefs, apply Best by Links report:

Apply Filter for 404 pages with backlinks.
Recreate valuable content and email linkers to suggest your page as a replacement.

b. Irrelevant Redirects

The competitors could 301 pages to irrelevant content that would leave linkers unsatisfied.

Using Ahrefs’ Best by Links report, filter for 301 redirects.
Using the Wayback Machine, identify whether redirects go to irrelevant pages.
Then pitch link replacements to point to other more relevant pages of your website.

Competitors Backlink Strategies Analysis

Beyond the possibility of replication, understanding a greater strategy at play in your competitors’ backlinks is going to help refine your approach. Here’s how you’d analyze these links:

Explore Anchor Text

Using Ahrefs’ Anchors report, discover what anchor texts commonly point to pages on your competitors’ sites. Those may reveal tactics such as:

Terms coined that attract backlinks
Popular topics which really get across to their audience.

Evaluate Traffic Sources

Observe sources of traffic for competitor pages using Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. If, say, a blog post on “SEO Statistics” is pulling in lots of traffic, then you may want to design a similar resource that can capture backlinks.

Final Thoughts

Competitor backlink analysis is one of the best ways to up your link-building game. You will drive better profiles and improve your rankings by finding links worth replicating, working tactics, and capturing link replacement opportunities where the links are outdated or no longer relevant.