Competitor Backlink Analysis
Research who links to your competitors, how strong those backlinks are, and how many quality links you need to close the gap and outrank them in search.
Focus
Backlink gap analysis
Method
Ahrefs & manual review
Output
Link building roadmap
Reply time
1 business day
When the same competitor keeps outranking you
Do you have a keyword you have been trying to rank for weeks and you keep getting outranked by the same competitor? Most of the times, this happens because of the backlinks your competitor owns. Competitor backlink analysis involves the process of researching and understanding who links to your competitors and how powerful those backlinks are compared to yours. Even in today's digital world, backlinks are still one of the most important factors determining your site's visibility in the search engine results.
Our team performs such analyses on a weekly basis. This is how we do it.
Identify Your Competitors
Before performing any competitor backlink analysis, you need to identify your actual competitors first. This process is much easier than it sounds.
Open Google in an incognito window and type in the main keyword, for which you want to rank for, in the search bar. The sites that appear in positions one through ten in that particular search result page are your competitors for that keyword, regardless of whether you know about their brand or not.
Why does this step matter? Your competitor in business does not necessarily mean your competitor in search. A local firm down the street may not be relevant to your SEO efforts at all, while a small niche blog, ranking in position three for your keyword may be getting the traffic that you want. It is all about visibility in search.
Repeat this process for your three to five important keywords. You are likely to find the same domains repeating themselves. These domains are the ones that you should pay attention to.
Check the Quality of Backlinks of Your Competitors in Ahrefs
After you found the right competitors, the next step is to check the quality of the backlinks they have, because ten thousand links from spammy directory sites are far less valuable than 200 links from high-quality and relevant websites.
A backlink is considered to be of good quality if it comes from a website that has a Domain Rating of 20 and more and gets 1,000 monthly visits at least. Below this threshold, backlinks can still improve your backlink profile but usually cannot impact your rankings by themselves.
To do this in Ahrefs:
- 1Open the Site Explorer and put your competitor's domain name there.
- 2Go to the Backlinks report via the sidebar.
- 3Apply filters for Domain Rating (20+) and Organic Traffic (1,000+).
- 4Look at the referring domains, their DR rating, traffic and anchor text.
This will give you more information than raw numbers of backlinks show. This will tell you how many backlinks your competitor has that meet certain criteria. To get a better picture of the backlinks of your competitor, perform the same analysis in Referring Domains report to see how many unique referring domains pass this criteria.
Compare Your Website Against the Competition
Now, having collected this information on the backlinks of your competitors, open the same reports for your website and compare them to each other:
- Your Domain Rating versus your competitor's DR;
- Number of quality referring domains (DR20+, 1,000+) you have compared to the ones they have;
- Organic traffic of your competitor versus yours for the same target keyword.
This comparison will give you a real backlink gap – the number of additional links you need to build to be comparable with your competitors. For example, if three competitors you are outranked by have 45 qualified referring domains and your site has only 12, you have got yourself a good starting point – you need to aim for around 30-35 good backlinks.
Backlinks are one piece of the puzzle
Links are just one of many ranking factors. Good content, proper keyword usage, and technical SEO still matter. But when your competitors share a similar backlink profile and you are significantly behind, closing the backlink gap is the easiest thing you can do.
Tools You Can Use for Competitor Backlink Analysis
As you already guessed, Ahrefs is our preferred backlink analysis tool, but there are other platforms to do this job, depending on your budget and reporting needs. Some of the existing include:
- Ahrefs biggest live backlink database, great for link intelligence and historical data;
- Semrush all-in-one platform with dedicated Backlink Gap tool for comparison;
- Moz Pro famous for its Domain Authority metric and user-friendly interface for link analysis;
- SE Ranking affordable platform with solid backlink monitoring, popular among agencies;
- Majestic specializes in Trust Flow and Citation Flow;
- SpyFu combines backlink data with competitor keyword research and paid search data.
Each platform uses its proprietary authority score and calculations, so try sticking to one tool when comparing yourself to the competition.
Let Us Do the Competitor Backlink Analysis for You
Performing manual audit of your competitors' backlinks, filtering them by quality and creating a working link building plan from this data is a time consuming process. Our team performs this off-page SEO audit regularly for our clients, transforming raw data into a practical roadmap of what type of domains you should focus on, what anchor text patterns should you avoid, and how many links you need to close the gap with your competitors.
Contact us now to know exactly where you stand and how many links you need to outrank your competitors in the search engine results pages.
Know exactly where you stand and how many links you need to outrank your competitors.
We turn competitor backlink data into a practical link building plan. Reply within one business day.