How to conduct a competitor backlink analysis
- Anastasia Kotsiubynska
- Jul 28
- 12 min read
Updated: Jul 29
Author: Anastasia Kotsiubynska
So you’ve nailed down the technical aspects of SEO, targeted the appropriate keywords, and optimized the right pages for them—but you’re still not ranking. The problem could be your website authority.
Website authority isn't a concrete metric, but rather a concept that estimates how credible and trustworthy a website is from the perspective of search engines. To increase your website authority, you need to build authoritative links to your site. This process can also improve your E-E-A-T, which contributes to SEO performance.
You can find some link building opportunities on your own as you browse the web or build relationships with other website owners. To do it in bulk, analyze the backlink profiles of your successful competitors.
This guide will explain what competitor backlink analysis is and share beginner-friendly techniques for executing it.
What is a competitor backlink analysis? + why it’s essential
Competitor analysis is a necessity in digital marketing and SEO. In marketing, part of success comes from knowing best practices and part from experimenting. Being a trailblazer can be expensive, as it means spending a portion of your marketing budget on strategies that may not produce results.
Analyzing what your competitors do saves resources because you can learn from other people’s mistakes and successes. It also allows you to get a better understanding of smaller details. Articles and webinars can describe the techniques in general terms. Looking at how others successfully implement them in real-world cases provides more information.
Backlink competitor analysis lets you see what websites link to your competition, how authoritative those websites are, and the context of the links. This data will help you understand how link building is done in your industry and gather hundreds of sites to reach out to.
The most important thing in competitor backlink analysis is not to blindly copy whatever backlink strategy they use. Instead, analyze it and understand what you can borrow.
Identify your competitors
Before you examine the competition, find websites you compete with. You’re looking for competitors who:
Rank for the keywords you target
Target a similar audience
Offer similar types of products or services
The easiest way to assess your competition is to Google your brand name. If your brand is well-known, your competitors may place ads for branded keywords.
Then, Google your main keyword to see who competes for it. In some cases, you may see articles with lists of your competitors in the SERP.
Sometimes, especially if you’re doing backlink analysis in the eCommerce niche, you’ll see large marketplaces like Amazon or Etsy in the search results. You can disregard those, as they’re not your direct competitors. Their backlink strategy isn’t going to be useful to you. You might also find a list of competing companies in the knowledge panel.
To complement this, search for informational keywords related to your industry. Ranking blog pages may belong to your competitors.
You can search for competitors with AI search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.
To simplify your competitive analysis process, consider using a tool like SE Ranking for Wix, which provides actionable insights directly within your website dashboard. This tool yields a list of competitors based on the keywords your site competes with others.
SE Ranking also has a suite of other instruments, including a backlink checker tool. We’ll use it to showcase research techniques.
How to do a competitor backlink analysis
Once you have a list of competitors, sift through them one by one. There are five major techniques for backlink competitive analysis.
01. Examine competitor link building strategies
The first step is getting a general overview of your competitors’ link building strategies by putting their sites through a competitor backlink analysis tool, like the one mentioned above. It will return a long list of backlinks. Pay close attention to common patterns.
Check how many backlinks and referring domains your competitor has. In this case, we’re starting with a major competitor, so it has a lot.
The next step is to view referring domains and analyze how they link to your competitor. You may want to filter domains by domain authority and traffic. You’ll sometimes see spammy links from domains with zero traffic, like this one.
Many spammy websites link to reputable ones. Some steal content and forget to delete internal links, while others place these links to pursue a shady SEO goal. These websites are irrelevant to link building efforts.
To avoid them cluttering your view, filter the list of domains by setting the minimum website traffic to 3-5K. This is around the median number of sessions for an average website, and filtering for it will show you websites with an audience.
Now, inspect each backlink closely to understand how your competitors received that link. Look at the page that links to them, the page linked, and the anchor text. You can also visit the page that links to your competitor and look at the context the link is placed in.
Let’s look at some examples.
The above link is from a listicle that describes a collection of tools. This competitor is pretty popular, so it might have received the link naturally. You can reach out to editors or the authors of articles like these and offer to review and add your tool to the list if it fits. Tap into your PR team’s resources if you have one at your company.
The above backlink is from a blog post and leads to a resource page on a competitor’s site. The anchor text is not straightforward, so it’s best to look at the page to see the context.
It’s clear that the author is talking about remote work and links to a competitor’s page that lists companies that hire remote workers. This link is likely not due to active outreach efforts but rather a helpful page attracts visitors, and people link to it naturally. You can emulate this by creating resource pages—statistics, research, templates, checklists, or any other helpful material to people in your industry.
Promote the page, and you’ll start getting links to it. This resource page has attracted over 200 backlinks.
If a competitor is a well-known brand or has a lot of helpful resource pages, people will naturally link to its site, and you’ll see multiple links from a single domain. When you see a single link from a domain and the anchor text contains a keyword, it’s likely the result of guest posting efforts by a competitor.
Save these domains to reach out to them with an article idea. You can find more sites like these by exploring links with the same anchor text.
Don’t just explore keyword-rich anchors, as informational ones can also be the result of guest posting efforts.
Some links will come from review websites. This website has three articles centered around reviews of a competitor.
At times, these sites will pick up your brand on their own. If they don’t have reviews on your brand, you can reach out and suggest your website for consideration.
A portion of backlinks come from directory websites. These sites act as large catalogues of businesses, sometimes constricted to a single industry or location. You can get a profile there and list your site, typically for a small annual fee.
Articles announcing internal news about a competitor are most likely press releases. You can save the sites that post those press releases and publish your own. It typically involves a fee.
A rarer type of backlink you’ll see is from news websites, like the above. You can get those by pitching industry news to journalists or by answering journalists’ requests on digital PR platforms. It may take a long time to get one, though.
Some good links are irrelevant for your link building efforts. For instance, links from business partners or job websites.
If you want to rank a page for a particular keyword, you can quickly view pages in SERP and the number of backlinks they have by running a keyword analysis in SE Ranking and looking at the SERP Overview.
As you go through your list, analyze competitors’ backlinks and note patterns in the links.
Which types of links do they get?
Which type dominates the backlink profile?
What pages do these sites link to?
What sites link to them?
If a website links to your competitor, it might also link to you, so save those websites to reach out to them. You can find similar sites that don’t link to your competitors and build links that they don’t have.
Don’t copy their strategy, though. For instance, if your competitors have links from press release websites that cost a lot to post, don’t rush to spend on PR. Instead, try working with news websites to get backlinks or create a resource page that can earn hundreds of links.
02. Analyze link quality
Outreach takes time and resources, so you should work with websites that can provide a lot of SEO value. Once you have a list of websites that link to your competitors, analyze their quality, and only reach out to the ones you think are good. Here’s how to do competitor backlink analysis. Pay attention to these areas:
Relevance to your business niche
High number of backlinks
Low number of spammy, low-quality backlinks
Decent traffic numbers
Good traffic dynamics
You can judge relevance by visiting the site and checking what it does and what its blog is about. It doesn’t need to match perfectly; it just needs to make sense. If an automotive blog links to an email marketing tool, it isn’t relevant. If it links to a car insurance website, it is.
For simplicity, many SEO tools use these factors to produce a relative website authority metric. In the case of SE Ranking, it’s called Domain Trust (DT). Domain Trust calculates the number and quality of backlinks a site has to estimate how likely it is to rank high in Google. It ranges from 0 to 100. The higher the number, the better a backlink from it would be.
The same metric is calculated for each page, called Page Trust (PT).
To simplify link quality analysis, filter your list of websites by DT, setting it at a minimum of 30 or 40, depending on your industry. If your industry isn’t invested in SEO, most sites won’t have as many backlinks, so a lower DT rating is normal.
Set the traffic volume at a minimum of 3-5K to filter out websites with little to no traffic.
If you want to determine whether a site is good for outreach efforts, look at each factor more closely.
First, inspect the backlink profile of this site. Preferably, you want to see a lot of backlinks and referring domains. If backlinks outnumber referring domains, this might mean one site links to it hundreds of times, which can mean they were using shady SEO practices.
Check the list of sites that link to it and look for reputable domains. If you see high-quality links, it’s a good sign.
Now, how do you check competitors’ backlinks for spam? You can run a toxic backlink check to find out how many shady links this site has. A few poor backlinks are normal, but if you see a lot of them, it means this site might be bad for you.
You can also perform a search for spammy content on the site. Use the search operator “site:” with this website to only see results from it, and type in a keyword associated with shady industries, like “site:example.com casino.” If you see multiple pages centered around a shady topic, the site is probably selling links, and its link might hurt your SEO.
The next big area to check is traffic. You want to see traffic on the site; the more, the better.
If traffic is declining like this, it might mean the site was hit with a Google penalty or was using poor SEO practices that stopped working and resulted in a drop in ranking across the site. Especially if it’s a sharp decline.
One problem isn’t enough to prevent you from getting a link from a site. If you see multiple issues with it, it’s best to avoid it.
If you’re still in doubt, run a quality check on the site. Browse it for ten minutes and note whether it has a good UX, covers topics from different angles instead of producing generic content, and publishes content regularly. All of these are signs of a good backlink opportunity. Not in the least because it may grow in popularity in the future since its content quality is high.
03. Leverage common and uncommon link resources
When you’re starting with link building, it’s best to go for low-hanging fruit. Building links that are easy to get helps you create a strong foundation so you can start improving your ranking.
To do this, concentrate on the sites that link to multiple competitors by running a backlink gap analysis with multiple competitors and selecting ones that link to all. Another method is to search a website you want to build a link from with the “site:” operator and include brand names of your competitors. For instance, “site:example.com Zapier.”
Those websites will have a higher probability of linking to your site. Those are directory sites, review sites, or websites that accept guest posts. Check that these websites are authoritative and reach out.
The other avenue is pursuing websites that rarely link to your competitors. Those links are harder to get, so it’s best to save your efforts and only reach out to the best. The upside is that few competing websites will have those high-quality links.
Most likely, you’ll see news links and links from blogs that don’t accept guest posts. Many SEO specialists will avoid working with a website if it doesn’t have a content submission policy. However, you’ll find that if you find the site’s editor and reach out with a good enough pitch, you may get a backlink.
04. Conduct a backlink gap analysis
If you've been doing link building for a while and have created links, run a backlink gap analysis to get competitor backlinks. It will show you a list of sites that link to your competitors but don’t link to you.
Some will likely be unattainable. For instance, links from other businesses that your competitor partnered with. Many others present a viable backlink opportunity.
Analyze them to ensure they fit your link building goals and reach out to them. Conducting an SEO gap analysis is a great idea in general, not just for backlink analytics. It can highlight your differences with the competition and help you improve your site’s SEO.
05. Monitor competitor's new and lost backlinks
A handy way to keep track of competitor link building efforts is to track their new and lost backlinks. You can view links added to your competitor's site in the last month in SE Ranking.
Some are spam links that appear from time to time, but seeing a lot of new links can indicate active, ongoing link building campaign.
This competitor consistently adds more links than it loses. Looking at those links closely shows you how your competitor does off-page SEO now and helps you inform your strategy with current practices.
You can either find new techniques and websites to reach out to or conclude that your competitor is engaging in outdated SEO practices and that you can outrank them easily.
Plan your outreach
After performing competitor backlink analysis, learn the strategies your competition uses, and have a list of websites that might link back to you. Then, it’s time to reach out.
You can get directory links by filling out company profiles. To earn links to resource pages or infographics, come up with helpful content ideas. For many other links, like guest posts and listicle placements, you’ll have to reach out to an editor with a relevant idea. That takes a planned approach.
First, you’ll want to go through the list and group those sites into similar categories. Separate them by the link building strategy being used, like guest posting or reaching out to get included into listicles. This makes it easier to scale the outreach while keeping it somewhat personalized.
You’re sure to find outliers, whether websites with high authority that aren’t likely to link to you easily or that require more effort to reach out to. Put them in a separate category and create a personalized approach to each.
Create email templates for each category. The first email in the sequence should include:
A brief introduction
The reason you’re reaching out
The reasoning as to why it’s worth it for them
In the introduction, don’t talk about your company and what it does. For an editor, it’s irrelevant. They would prefer to know about who you are as an author and what your expertise is.
For listicles, explain why your company is good enough to be included in the list. Provide the number of users you have, or branded keyword search volume—both these factors show that online users would be interested in reading a brief description of your company. For guest post articles, explain how your topic benefits their audience.
Don’t stop at just one email. People’s inboxes are full of unread emails, and it might take several follow-ups to have your email read. According to an informal survey, following up can bring in 40% more links.
Reaching out to the right person is just as important as following the best practices of email marketing. Here’s how you can find them.
Search “site:example.com write for us” or “site:example.com contribute.” This will give you the company’s designated content outreach email if they have one.
Search the site’s team page for the editor’s contact information.
Search Linkedin for their editor.
Use an email finder tool to find their editor’s LinkedIn or email address.
If all else fails, contact them via a generic website email address or contact form.
In large companies, contact the editor. Smaller ones may not have one, so you’ll be looking for their Head of Content, Head of Marketing, or a person with a similar title.
Once you’ve contacted a person responsible for their content and gotten a link, foster a working relationship with them. You both can help each other out with content if needed and exchange backlink opportunities.
If you’re working on acquiring a guest post, publish it under your name as a contributor writer. Having your name mentioned on multiple sites builds up your authority and improves E-E-A-T. This means Google’s algorithms learn you’re an expert in the field, and articles on your site will be more likely to rank well.
Anastasia Kotsiubynska is the Head of SEO at SE Ranking. She is passionate about online marketing, analytics, and the technical aspects of SEO.
