Published on June 18th, 2019 | by Bibhuranjan

Practical Guide on How to Analyze Competitors’ Backlink Profile

Before we dive any deeper into our story, it’s not a bad idea to set the records straight and explain what a backlink represents in the first place. In its most basic sense, a backlink is a URL that’s placed within a web content (most commonly its textual content like blog posts, reviews, announcements, or some other type of text) on a website that is related to the industry of the backlink URL provider. Even more close to the point, a backlink is a page address that you would link to a certain anchor phrase within the textual content that you publish on high-rated websites.

What is backlink analysis?

Backlink analysis is a process that allows you to screen a competitor’s web address to determine the number of websites that keep your rival’s links within the content. It’s a manner of obtaining first-hand info about your competitors’ content marketing strategy. If you want to know where your main competitors hunt for their share of the audience, the backlink analysis is the most effective method.

Why you should Analyze Competitors’ Backlink Profile?

According to research, the companies that perform backlink analysis detect a strong correlation between the analysis process and conversion rate improvement. There are currently more than 1.6 billion active websites, all of which hold a certain value in terms of traffic, authenticity, SERP rank (Search Engine Results Page rank) and many other aspects that form the overall website marketing value when combined. In order to create a list of websites that you want to use for your link building strategy, you have to engage an SEO backlink checker tool that will scan your competitors and show you where the enemy is laying their eggs.

Imagine driving a car through the woods, looking for a way out. Without the competition backlink profile analysis, you would focus on holding the wheel, unaware of hidden paths and road signs that could lead you to your destination much faster and safer.

Identify and Validate Your Main Competitors

The first order of business is creating the list of opposition websites that you want to analyze. There are a series of different tools that you can use for this purpose like Alexa ranking and others. With Alexa’s Similar Website Finder tool, you are able to find a vast number of competitor websites. However, what you need is the list of pages that have the highest overlap ratio, which means you attract the closest target audience, there’s no need to mimic a business that runs a different race, entirely.

Once we created the list of websites that we want to analyze and use their modus operandi to build our own strategy for the future, it’s time to dissect the backlink profile of each of our competitors.

Referring Domains

Depending on the history of your competitors, you could have a long list of websites where you can look for an opportunity to publish a post with your own backlink. Make sure to analyze the referring domains well so you could rest assured that you’ve made the right choice. Of course, the fact that a website would publish your content is not a warranty for the success of your endeavor. The ability to publish your content should be just a reason to dig deeper and create a funnel that will leave you with an optimal choice.

Explore their keywords

Keywords play a significant role in SEO for as long as this strategy exists. However, Google continuously improves its search algorithm, which made the use of keywords somewhat less important but still significant enough to affect your link building strategy decisions. Keep an eye on keyword density, placement and the number of long tail keywords.

Pay close attention to keywords included in the anchor text. The anchor text is a phrase that’s linked to backlink. Give a slight advantage to posts that contain keywords that are similar to your own or at least close enough. The logic is simple, Google wants the linked content to be as closely related as possible to the anchor phrase to which the link is stuck. Moreover, you can utilize the keywords you detected during the analysis to build your content around them.

Meta Tags Information

A long time ago, Meta tags were arguably the most important element of search engine optimization. However, nowadays the world’s most popular search engine doesn’t pay as much attention to whether or not your Meta title includes a keyword that a user typed into the search bar. The correlation between the keywords and the Meta tags, however, should not be dismissed, as Semantic search technology is doing a great job anticipating the users’ intention when performing a keyword-based search.

Analyze your competitors and try to figure out what you could implement in your marketing campaign.

Explore Their Backlinks

Follow your competitors’ backlinks to see what kind of platform is open to your type of content. Furthermore, take a short look at the number of links that lead your rival to the same source and figure out which option would best serve your purposes. It’s better to have 10 links distributed on 10 different platforms than having 15 links on a single page, according to SEO best practices.

Content Analysis

Take a look at how the content is presented, check out the number of words within each article title, and study the content topics, structure, and tone, practically all of the elements that determine the quality of your effort. Hoping for a top-rated publisher is your legal and human right but you also need to make sure that you can provide the proper quality to even see your post published. Pay attention to the average word count, because you don’t want to stray too much from the original style and flow.

Analyze Their Design

We live in the visual world where appearance still matters. Keep an eye on the design features of your competitors and compare their website appearance with your own website design solution. If you notice that the opponent’s design is superior to yours, do whatever you can to improve the inadequacies on your webpage. The website design plays more than just the aesthetic part of the equation, it also influences the performance and functionality of your entire digital footprint. Poor website performance is your worst enemy, 40 percent of people will not wait longer than 3 seconds before returning back to the referring domain in case your page doesn’t load instantly.

Conclusion

The immortal Pablo Picasso once said that the good artists copy, while the great artists steal from others. Controversial as this statement might appear, there is a major difference between copying and stealing an idea. Don’t analyze your competitors only to do the exact same thing they did. Utilize their experience in order to create your own unique approach in all possible aspects. Remember that almost everyone is implementing link building as part of their SEO improvement and overall marketing strategy. It’s the authenticity and the quality of content you create that ultimately takes the cake.

Tags: backlink, keyword, link building, SEO, website

About the Author

Bibhuranjan Editorial Officer, technofaq.org I'm an avid tech enthusiast at heart. I like to mug up on new and exciting developments on science and tech and have a deep love for PC gaming. Other hobbies include writing blog posts, music and DIY projects.