Competitor backlink analysis: turn a rival’s links into your list

Your search rivals are not always your business rivals. The sites to analyse are the ones that hold the results pages for the searches you want, which may include a blog, a directory or a much larger company.

• Take three or four queries your buyers use, and list who ranks in the top five.
• Keep the ones that sell something like what you sell, and the ones that are lists in your category.
• Drop the giants. You are not earning a link from a page a thousand sites link to, and their profile is mostly noise for your purposes.
• Two rivals of a similar size to you is a better study than eight of any size.

You need referring domains rather than individual links: one row per site, not one row per URL. Every link index has its own crawl, so two tools will disagree about the same rival, and both are partial.

1. 1

   Choose the view

   Referring domains, sorted by whatever authority score the tool uses, filtered to links that are still live.

2. 2

   Export to a sheet

   Keep four columns: the domain, the page linking, the page it links to, and the anchor. Delete the rest.

3. 3

   Do the same for the second rival

   Then mark the domains that appear for both. A site that links to two of your rivals and not to you is the most qualified name on the list.

4. 4

   Remove what you cannot use

   Scrapers, aggregators, sites in languages you do not serve, and anything that looks generated. Usually half the export.

The free version: Search Console's Links report shows only your own links, but Bing Webmaster Tools includes a backlink comparison against another domain at no cost, which is enough to start.

Sort every surviving row into one of these. The sorting is the analysis: the raw list means nothing until it is grouped by what you would have to do to get the same link.

There is a fifth pile: bought placements. You will recognise them by the site that covers four unrelated industries and by an anchor that reads like a product page title. Leave those alone. Google's policy covers them and the links are mostly ignored anyway.

An export is not a plan. Take the listings pile and the editorial pile, pick ten rows, and decide the specific reason each site would link to you rather than to them.

1. 1

   Open the page that carries the link

   Not the home page. Read the paragraph or the list entry where the rival appears, and ask what the reader wanted there.

2. 2

   Decide what you would offer

   A free tool, a clearer explanation, a corrected fact, a category they are missing. If you cannot name it in one clause, skip the row.

3. 3

   Check for a defect

   Run a broken link checker over the page. A dead link on a list gives you a reason to write that is about them and not about you.

4. 4

   Write one paragraph, by hand

   Name the section, name what you have, make it easy to say no. Ten of these beats a hundred sent from a tool.

Half the value is not a link list at all. Reading where a rival's links come from tells you how they got attention, which is usually the more useful finding.

• A cluster of coverage on one date means a launch or a study. Look at what it was.
• Many links to one page means an asset: a tool, a report, a template. That page is their best marketing and you can see it for free.
• Many integration pages means the product is embedded in an ecosystem, which is a moat and also a map of partners you could approach.
• Almost all listings and nothing else means they have not earned anything yet, which tells you the category is open.

Worked example. Two rivals both have thirty links to the same kind of page: a free calculator. Neither has a link to a comparison page. The finding is not a list of emails, it is that a free calculator is what gets linked in this category, and that nobody has written the comparison yet.

Once a quarter is plenty, and the second run is faster because you only look at what is new.

• Export again, and filter to domains that appeared since last time.
• New coverage tells you what your rival shipped or published.
• New listings tell you about directories that have appeared in the category.
• Links you have won since last time go in a separate tab, so you can see the profile you are building rather than the one you are chasing.

Judge your side the same way you judge theirs: referring domains a person in your field would recognise, and what they send. A count of links is a vanity number in both directions.