While the term ‘stealing’ backlinks might carry negative connotations, the process is quite valuable. It allows you to level the playing field, securing high-quality, unavailable links. Start by analyzing your competitors’ backlink profiles. Look for niche-specific directories, resource pages, or guest blogging opportunities they have secured.
Use Ahrefs to Analyze Their Backlinks
You can use Ahrefs to analyze your competitor’s backlink profiles, essential in understanding their link-building strategies. How to find competitor backlinks? To do this, enter your competitors’ URLs into the tool to fetch data on their backlinks. Then, look for high-quality referring domains that you can use to build your links. For example, if your competitor has many backlinks from industry blogs, you could contact those bloggers to discuss potential guest posting opportunities. To find your competitors’ backlinks, go to Site Explorer and enter the domain or URL of the page you want to analyze. Then click Backlinks to see all of their incoming links. You can filter by domain or referring domain to get more granular results. Ahrefs’ Backlinks database is one of the largest in the world, so you should be able to find all the backlinks your competitors have. However, it would be best to remember that not all backlinks are created equal.
Evaluate Their Anchor Text Distribution
Creating a backlink profile with an ideal mix of SEO anchors can be challenging, but it is possible. You’ll need to understand what makes up a strong anchor text distribution. Ideally, you’ll have a mix of branded text anchors (your brand name or some variation), domain name anchors, exact match keyword anchors, and un-optimized phrases. Then, you’ll need to determine the proportion of each category within your competitor’s existing anchor text distribution. It’s important to note that the consensus is to avoid over-optimizing anchors to prevent penalties. Therefore, it’s best to focus on earning links naturally (or at least, as close to naturally as possible).
Examine Their Backlink Metrics
Seeing where competitors are sourcing their backlinks can help you develop a link-building strategy that replicates success. For example, you identify a website linked to your competitor multiple times. In that case, you can approach them with personalized outreach messages highlighting your content’s value to their audience. This strategy can open doors you may not have otherwise been able to tap into. Examining the quality of your competitor’s backlinks is also a vital step in this process. Checking metrics like DA, PA, and the number of referring domains can help you determine the strength of a particular backlink. Another valuable metric to look for is the age of the backlink. The older a backlink is, the more trust it can offer. Look for links sourced from reputable websites with a lot of longevity. Search engines look for These kinds of backlinks in a high-quality backlink profile.
Evaluate Their Referring Domains
Getting links from the same sites as your competitors is essential to effective link building. You can use Ahrefs’ referring domains report to find websites linking to your competitors. Once you have a list of referring domains, you can analyze them to learn what kind of content is attracting the attention of these sites. Then, you can take this information and apply it to your strategy. This may include identifying opportunities to guest post, submitting a product review to the same sites, or seeking out branded mentions to increase visibility. Another thing to watch for is broken links, which can be a strategic inroad for backlink acquisition. For example, if a health blog has a broken link to an article on the benefits of organic tea, you can ask the blogger to replace it with a relevant link to your website.
