Understanding your own backlinks is always a good practice, but if you can learn to dig into a competitor’s backlinks and find insights for your SEO plan, you’ll be able to take over the competition and keep getting more backlinks. The Backlinks Competitors report generates a report showing you which domains you share the most common backlinks with to learn who your top competitors are.
The competitors in the table will be listed by their Competition Level. This metric is calculated based on the number of referring domains pointing to each competitor and the number of common referring domains between the two competitors (your queried domain and the domain in the table). If websites have a large number of common referring domains, they can be considered competitors. Click on a competitor in the Domain column to see their Backlinks Overview.
You can also sort the table of competitors by:
- Number of referring domains
- Number of total referring domains
- Number of backlinks
If you click on any of these numbers, you’ll jump to a corresponding report in another tab of the backlinks research section. Click on a number under the Common Referring Domains column to open a Backlink Gap report. Click on a number in the total referring domains to open that domain’s Referring Domains report. And click on a number in the backlinks column to look at all of their backlinks in the Backlinks report.
What should I do next?
After discovering your closest competitors, you can query their domains into the search bar and analyze everything about their backlink profile. You’ll want to lookup their referring domains to find their top partnerships, indexed pages for their most attractive content, and anchors to identify the most popular topics associated with their links.
When looking at a competitor’s link profile, chances are you’ll find some partnerships that they have and you don’t. Maybe they have links from bloggers, product reviewers or media website in your niche that you could replicate.
If your website offers similar products or services as your competition, you could inquire about reaching a similar partnership through an outreach campaign.
If you’re working on a newer website that doesn’t have a lot of links yet, simply enter another website from your industry into the search bar. Then, take the list of their top competitors and look for all of the backlinks in your niche that you can go after.
Besides that you can use the data from the report to build a successful media buying strategy.