How to analyze competitor’s backlinks to plan your own backlink strategy

While Google keeps claiming that its algorithms are focusing on showing good content first, there’s no doubt that backlinks are still one of the most important ranking factors. Everyone who is even a bit familiar with SEO knows that backlinks are crucial, and acting wrong with them will damage your rankings if Google suspects you in cheating.

In this article, I will show you how to find out your successful competitors link building strategy and build a successful and organic backlink profile in just 3 simple steps.

Step 1. Define the competitors.

You should study your main competitors even before you launch your website.
If you’re still not sure, you can use a competitor analysis tool, such as Serpstat.

Just enter your domain address and hit search. You’ll see the domain overview dashboard, which shows the general information.
Scroll down until you see the Competitors Graph, it looks like this:

On this graph, your website will be at the right top corner; your most direct competitors are the ones which on this graph are placed the closest to your website. Serpstat accounts it due to the number of similar keywords and the size of sites. If you see some website close to yours, that you know ranks well, start with it.

Step 2. Analyze the competitor’s backlink profile.

There are few things you need to look for when analyzing a competitor’s backlink profile.

1 Trust Rank and Page Rank.

The lower their score is, the better for you. You should aim to get a higher score on these metrics.

Trust rank is

Page rank is

2 Number of referring pages and domains

This is basically the number of backlinks that your competitor has. If you’re worried about the number being too high, make sure to check the list of referring domains. You can safely ignore the ones with low-quality scores:

There are typically lots of them.

3 Anchors

You should understand that we’re not looking at what anchors the competitor is using, we’re mostly interested in the number of various anchors, especially the ones that imply SEO, such as “cheap airplane tickets” or “best home appliances prices.”

If your successful competitor ranks with a certain distribution of anchors with and without keywords, you should copy his tactics. For example, on the screenshot we can see that most anchors are either empty or branded and there is a very low number of anchors optimized with keywords.

Distribution will vary based on the niche, area and many other factors, so there is no formula that you can apply to any project.

Hint: while having a keyword in domain address doesn’t influence ranking, it’s easier to score a backlink with a keyword if your address hosts that keyword.

Step 3. Work on your backlinks.

When working on your backlinks, you have to find the link building opportunities and keep your link building efforts under the radar. In this step, I will show you few methods to find opportunities and teach you how to stay unnoticed.

Link building opportunities — competitor analysis.

In the previous step, we analyzed the competitor’s donors to see how many of them are low quality. Websites from that list are the places to start when it comes to link building. Start with the sites with high authority scores, visit the referring pages and find out how exactly the links were obtained there. Some websites allow UGC or links in user profiles. If those links are do-follow, there isn’t a reason to skip this opportunity.

Link building opportunities — forums.

No, not just any forums. Only relevant forums with relevant topics indexed by Google.

To find these forums and topics, you can use the following operators: inurl: and intitile:.
By searching for a keyword you’re targeting and adding operators inurl and intitle with the word “forum” as a variable, you will find forum threads related to your topic:

Staying under the radar

To avoid penalties for link building, you have to make it look natural. We already discussed the distribution of anchors with keywords, but there’s one more crucial part — ratio of do-follow / nofollow links.

Some experts say that 50/50 ratio is best when it comes to the distribution of do-follow/nofollow links:

Others say it should be 60/40 in favor of dofollow links. Only Google knows the real answer, but cases published by various experts say that it’s best to keep the ratio close to 50/50. If 90% your links are dofollow — that’s a red flag, and if your number of nofollow links is 90%, that’s bad for your authority. So my advice is — try to stay close to the 50/50 ratio, but don’t fiddle with the numbers when you start receiving backlinks naturally.

P.S.

My biggest advice is — don’t let one source be your guide when it comes to the matter as delicate as link building. There are lots of experts and an equal amount of opinions. Always consider the risks, be careful when trying to optimize your website by breaking the Google’s guidelines.