Video transcript
How many links do you need to improve your rankings? How many links do you need to get to number one? A quick and easy way to figure that out is to use SEMrush, Ahrefs or another link research tool and see how many links your nearest competitors have. How many links do they use to get to number one? Try and do the same.
Competitor backlink analysis
Let’s dig deeper into why links are so important in SEO before we go any further, though I need you to understand that it’s not just the number of links that’s important to ranking. It’s the quality of the links. So let’s take a moment to look at what makes a quality link.
If you had a single link from the most authoritative voice in your niche, it would be worth more than having many, many backlinks from lots of very low-quality websites.
The reason we start this journey by looking at who is linking to competitors is so that we can get a feel for how active your competitors are in the digital marketing sphere.
For example, if we look at one of your competitors and they have lots and lots of links from publications like magazines, it might be the case that they are working with a PR agent to bolster their SEO strategy. Or perhaps lots of backlinks from online magazines might mean they are good at publishing press releases.
Interestingly, sometimes, some of the tactics that might be seen as a little old-fashioned in SEO are still some of the most effective.
Once we have researched the backlinks of our competitors, we can start to try and copy as many of them as possible. The closer we can get to having the same backlink profile as a competitor, the easier it is to surpass the usefulness of your competitors’ backlinks and build better backlinks of your own.
This is particularly true with new companies or new websites. Cloning or copying your competitors’ backlinks gives you a really good head start, and although it might not be enough by itself to massively boost your rankings, it at least gets you to the start line and gets you level with your competitors.
So, where do we go to start researching backlinks for your own website? You can go to Google Search Console and find all the information you need, but unless you’re on very good terms with your competitors, there is zero chance they are going to share their Google Search Console login with you. This is when we turn to software tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz. There are many options and subscriptions available to show you the backlinks behind almost any site on the Internet.
I am sometimes asked who the best provider of backlink info is, and the honest truth is none of them have all the data that Google does, so it’s best to pick one and stick with it. If you have the luxury of a larger budget and have signed up for several SEO tools, you’ll soon notice that they all have slightly different data. As with a lot of things in SEO, backlink research should be seen as a type of analysis that requires a hefty pinch of salt.
It is not unusual for some website owners to block tools like Moz or other non-Google crawlers because they don’t want competitors to learn where all their backlinks come from.
When we are looking at a website we haven’t seen before, we sometimes see it as a red flag if backlinks are blocked because it can also mean that the website owner is employing some black hat techniques to improve their rankings. No matter how tempting it might be, if you discover that competitors are committed to using black hat techniques, do not copy them. Just sit back and wait for their rankings to drop, because they always will.
Last Updated on December 14, 2023
