Can I go for backlink search with my competitors?

Yes, spying on your competitors for backlink search is a great idea. In fact, it’s among my top featured and use-proven tricks in the sphere of the Search Engine Optimization. I mean you can simply use your competitor’s backlinks at your own ranking advantage. Using a wise combination of free tools you are always free to benefit from the advanced backlink search and check for standing out of the competition, no matter how tight it could actually be.

Who knew that running a competitive backlink search could be so efficient? Most commonly, I’m using this strategy on every new online project, first and foremost. Well, let’s have it - competitor backlink search doesn’t need any learn spinning or too sophisticated software tools. In fact, it would be perfect even for those guys still new to the process of link building, as well as the very concept of SEO. As a result, you are going to benefit from the best backlinks of your top 10 market opponents all leading the way to your own lucky website.

Before everything else, how to find your competitors backlinks? I suggest following this simple set of actions for your backlink search:

1. Make up the main URL list of your most influential competitors.

2. Detect all competitor backlinks using either a free or a paid online checker tool.

3. Throw everything together in your main list of competitor URLs.

4. Run a complete backlink analysis.

5. Reproduce the backlinks of your competitors to your web pages.

6. Shape up a single storage on all your backlink data for a future reference.

Step 1

Before anything else, you will need to get the top 10 organic search results for a specific keyword ranking you are targeted at. Once a quick search on Google has been completed, put each found URL into your main list to proceed with the backlink check-up procedure.

Step 2

And here you are going to have a check for your competitor backlinks so that your backlink search will be driven by online checker tools. Hint: don’t hesitate to have a repeated test using as many different tools as you can. I mean here that every related framework suffers from the same problem - none of them can provide us a fully complete overview of a backlink profile by URL. Why? Simply because they are always offering a various range of results, each driven by the individual database and so on.

And here we are entering a quite delicate junction - what is the best set of checker tools (both paid, and the ones available in open access for free) to be used for competitor backlink search? As I already said, it’s just up to you to decide. Below are some of my most featured tools, as well as the rest of options I tried testing by self. As for me, I normally use the following three online frameworks: Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, and SEO Spyglass. Among the rest of use-proven solutions, you might as well apply for Open Site Explorer, Backlink Watch, Link Diagnosis, Small SEO Tools, and Semalt Analyzer.

Step 3

Once you have gathered all the backlinks from as many top competitors on Google’s search as possible, you can proceed with creating the main list of backlink search. I mean here you should merely throw everything together in your main list of competitor URLs. Moving on, use notepad to create a single master list (.txt file), copy all the links you managed to find, and just save it. Next, you will have to exclude the duplicates. As for me, I used Dupe Remove free online tool to remove the duplicates and have everything clear.

Step 4

And here we are finally coming to the point - competitor backlink search and analysis itself. For that moment your main list of backlinks is most likely to become pretty bulky. That’s why you should have a double check to make sure you are going to pick out only the best samples for achieving their maximum efficient performance. That way, pay attention and figure which backlinks are just indexed by Google, and which ones have got a certain PR value with them. Of course, the latter ones would be a number one priority for our backlink search. At the same time, note that merely anything indexed in Google must be good enough to be linked to your web pages.

That way, I’ve got four use-proven methods to complete your competitor backlink search and analysis. Here they are, in brief:

• Rank Checker is a free SEO software tool designed exactly for a precise process of backlink analysis. You’d better try it first and foremost, before exploring the rest of options.
• If there is Scrapebox available, you can use it manage the whole masses of different data, such as which links are actually live, what anchor text they currently have, how much PR and indexing value on Google they got.
• You might as well use Excel and its free SEO tools to create a pretty fine prospecting spreadsheet. Yes, the task may seem a little bit time-consuming, but it’s still worth every single effort.
• For a purely complete backlink search and analysis, you’d better try SEO Spyglass. It’s not only an ordinary link checker tool, but a full-stack online platform to run an in-depth analysis for each URL’s backlinks and evaluating their quality characteristics. Simply paste your main list of URLs and enjoy all the backlinks displayed for each.

Step 5

Now it’s time to reproduce the backlinks of your competitors to your own web pages. All you need here is to work persistently on each single link at a time. Delve into the process of your competitors’ link building and open each backlink in the Internet browser. That way, you will understand in what way each market opponent earned his best backlinks. Should it be a blog comment, you will just have to post a new comment of your own. In case it’s a forum post, you will have to pass the registration and simply join the current discussion. Sometimes it might as well be a guest blogging post, so you will have to send the email and invest some time in submitting a new guest post of yours. Simply go through this “list of replica, ” and you will get an overall understanding of the process.

Step 6

Shape up a single storage on all your backlink data for a future reference. That would be your very valuable business asset after all. So, once you have completed the list of reproduced backlinks, don’t forget to make a note of every successful replication, submission, as well as all your failures (i.e., stuck backlinks). Running a bulk check for your competitor backlinks, you should check which of them you now use to root a live backlink from. Make a separate spreadsheet or backlink database and enjoy the best progress (even for any other projects, over and over again). That’s going to be cool!