The ability to recognize which competitors’ tactics are worth emulating and adopt those practices can be tremendously advantageous. This certainly rings true when it comes to brands competing for greater visibility, more traffic, and better search rankings.
Specifically, gaining insight into the backlinks that connect audiences with your competitors can uncover valuable opportunities to establish stronger link-building strategies, pursue specific backlinks for audiences you want to get in front of, and increase your site’s digital authority.
Having access to competitor backlinks through specialized tools can provide a brand with a competitive edge. This insight reveals the best practices in your industry and helps you refine your marketing strategy by gaining a better understanding of your competition and audience behavior.
A detailed analysis of your competitors’ backlinks allows you to:
1) Size up the competitors you know – and those you might not – in your industry.
You are undoubtedly well-aware of your major competitors, but a look at competitor backlinks will reveal more companies and sites in your field with audiences that overlap with yours. You can also discover how competitors of a similar size to you (and those you aspire to) perform as far as earning links. By assessing their practices, you can formulate a strategy to compete more efficiently and successfully.
2) Evaluate the quantity and quality of competitor links to set your own (well-informed) goals.
Knowing the norms for your industry and what works for competitors will help guide the strategy you employ to reach comparative levels of achievement. For example, if your average competitor has 100 backlinks, and your site is out of sync with that number, you now have a reasonable benchmark that your site should aim to match. This competitor average demonstrates what’s possible – if they can do it, you can do it too.
Keep in mind, however, that all links are not equal. Assessing the quality of the competition’s backlinks will complete the picture of how certain site rankings and traffic levels are earned. For instance, a site’s success in landing a position on the first page of search results might be the result of backlinks. By strategically evaluating successful sites, you can work to achieve similar successes.
3) Determine which backlinking sites and pages are most popular and relevant.
Uncovering the strongest sites in your competitors’ backlink profile enables you to focus your marketing more efficiently by developing relationships with the most valuable sites whose audience overlaps with yours. Your link-building strategy can be further enhanced by researching which types of content represent strong themes. Then approach the most opportune sites with content ideas you already know they find compelling.
4) Follow through with a link-building strategy that leverages your newly-informed knowledge of competitors’ practices.
Now armed with a comprehensive understanding of your competitors’ activities, it’s possible to approach those traffic sources that most benefit your competitors and make them your own. You can pursue a campaign of developing backlinks with these sources, including taking advantage of possible guest blogging opportunities and other methods of placing content and backlinks with prominent, high-value sites. This includes pitching compelling content to the most appropriate sites to derive the most effective results. At the same time, you can ensure that your site is competitive in your industry when it comes to both the quantity and quality of the backlinks you establish, as well as the ultimate results as far as the traffic they yield.
By putting the information gained from your competitor backlink analysis to work, you should be able to meaningfully increase your site’s traffic and improve your search engine rankings (while matching – or surpassing – the achievements of your competitors).