How to Check Competitor Backlinks
It is spoken a lot about ways how to find competitors backlinks? Why might you ever need it? Learning something about competitors, especially those who have achieved something in the niche, is always useful. But finding competitors backlinks can also bring a lot of benefits to your SEO and, hence, the website ranking. This is already something, isn’t it?
Not every competitor deserves your attention. Those websites that rank low cannot deliver much use to you. The same can be told about the companies whose activities differ from yours.
Those companies that work in exactly the same niche and have already achieved some success are your target for researching on their link building strategies.
Thus, finding competitors backlinks is especially helpful if:
- You are just starting either your business or launching a site;
- You have already an established company but the website doesn’t rank as you would like it to do.
In the first case, the reason why you want to learn about competitors is crystal clear. They have already developed some strategies that bring success. You might check their anchors, keywords, research on which resources their links are placed, and use this knowledge to create your own anchors. You might even want to check the resources on which the competitor’s backlinks are located. It means that users there are interested in the same product or service that you are going to provide. Those users can become your clients if you offer something special or more beneficial.
If you see that an online resource of some company constantly takes the first place in the ranking, researching about their link building practices will be highly beneficial for you. Instead of checking, making mistakes, and so on, you can benefit from the practice of a different company that has already been proven as successful.
Make Sure You Choose Competitors Correctly
There are cases when people do everything correctly: they choose top companies that operate in the same niche. They check their links and find out on which resources these links are placed. Then, the content is created that might interest the users of those resources.
With it, everything stops. New traffic doesn’t come, the site doesn’t move up in ranking, rare visitors click on a couple your resource`s pages and leave your site.
What is going on? The thing is that the competitor was identified incorrectly. Even though the company might work in the same niche, you shall consider a lot of small details if you want to make the right decision. For example, if you run a cosmetic company and your supposed competitor, too, works in the same field, check what kind of cosmetics the company sells. If your focus is decorative cosmetics, and they work with cosmetics developed specifically to take care of hands, their anchors will not work for you. People who are interested in hand-care will click on them but as soon as they are moved to your site, they will leave it to never come back.
One more factor is geography. If you are a small company working locally make sure that you can indeed use all the sites for your linkbuilding campaign that international corporations use. For instance, a celebrity might not be interested in your product while buying similar products from a brand with a world-known name. It might also happen that for your environment, other anchors will be more appropriate, for example, those that contain specific keywords typical to that particular place only.
These are just a couple of examples. But from them, you can see that every detail is crucial.
It is not sufficient to know how to view competitors backlinks. Make an experiment. Select those competitors whose links you would like to find. How many of them will you find? Thousands! Even if your niche is very specific, the list will be immense. If competition in your sector is high, you might be even scared by the length of the list. It is difficult to imagine how you can analyze and check every link to find out whether it can be useful for your linkbuilding campaign.
Thus, don’t choose a lot of companies. We would say that selecting even ten major players is too much. What about choosing one or a maximum of two companies? But their rating shall be the highest among similar companies. Even in such a case, you will get a lot of results, thousands of them. But handling them with a proper tool will be possible.
You can control the links
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There Are Special Tools to Assist You
Now, when you have determined the companies whose backlinks you would like to monitor, it is time to learn about how to check competitor backlinks.
There are useful tools to help such users find backlinks of competitors. You can pick any of them. You might want to choose one with the best interface. Some users prefer tools that provide top functionality. Some linkbuilders prefer cheaper or even free link checker tools while others would opt for a tool that is expensive but offers some specifics that are not provided by more affordable options. Thus, the choice is yours.
How to Use a Link Checker
To use any backlink checker, you shall perform standard steps:
- Type or copy-paste in the tool the URL of the site of your competitor;
- Start the analysis;
- The tool will detect all the links leading to the site. Be ready to find out that there are thousands of them;
- To use them most beneficially, you need to arrange them. For that, the «Sort» option exists, use it.
How to Check Links and Use Them
It is not enough to find backlinks of competitors. You have done it for a purpose, thus, it is time to check your competitors backlinks.
Most users would pay attention to text links only. This is not correct. There are also image links, form links, and similar. Ignoring them is the worst thing you can do.
Now, it is time to use all those opportunities you have found out about. If you don’t know how to start, here is a short plan of possible actions:
- Letting know you might work out. Thus, write a mail or reach in any other way the owner of the resource where the link is placed. A simple greeting might be a nice start of a very productive linkbuilding strategy;
- What about offering a guest post? It might be welcomed if you can create content valuable for the site owner;
- Link that resource. You might get a link there as a response to your kind action. May use this practice to get links even without asking for them.
If you find the links of a competitor on some forums, you might need to register there and start participating in discussions. Answer questions, provide expert advice, and people will start getting interested in you and your company. Once they need something that you offer, they will buy it from you because they know you as an expert.
Make Others Do All the Work for You
This linkbuilding strategy might look unfair. But let us look at it from a different point of view. All those sites where your competitors are posting links are open to the public and they have some value in your niche. If you make proper research, you will find them anyway sooner or later. Thus, why waste your valuable time if you can find them right now?
The other thing is that finding a site that is used by another company for their linkbuilding companies is not sufficient. You need to perform a lot of work to be able to place your backlink there. You need to create valuable content, to contact the site owners, to discuss with them the ways how you can get your resource linked to their sites, and similar.
If you can facilitate at least the initial stage — the one connected with the search for the places where you can get a link, why not use this opportunity? Make sure you do it properly, and soon, you will be able to compete at the same level as the best company in your field.