How Analysing Competitors Can Improve Your Link Building Strategy

Link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs. is the most important element in any content marketing plan. Due to this, you want to give your business every chance of running a successful link building campaign. While keeping up-to-date with the latest linking building rules and guidelines is vital, there’s another tactic you need to incorporate: competitor analysis.

Every smart business owner understands that, along with knowing what is going on within their own organisation, they have to be aware of what is happening on the outside. By keeping tabs on the competition, you not only can learn more about effective link building strategies but also remain ahead of the game in your efforts to dominate the Google search results.

So how can competitor analysis for link building help your own marketing efforts? This link building guide reveals all.

The reasons to run a competitor link building analysis

So before anything else, it’s essential to understand the following question: What does performing a competitor link analysis entail, exactly? Well, this is where you review websites that exist within your industry, the type that is targeting the same customer base as your own site. With this competitor research, you want to assess the number of backlinks they possess, their website performance, and overall online authority.

With this type of information at your disposal, you can:

• Accurately measure against the competition: By analysing the competition, you are given an accurate insight into their work. You can learn about how well they’re doing with their link building strategies, and measure this against your own work. Are they outranking you on Google? In this case, see how many backlinks they have in comparison. For instance, say your competitors average 150 backlinks in total. If you only have 75 backlinks in place currently, this shows you need to rapidly up your numbers to try and usurp their search engine
• Learn about their high-quality backlinks: Even if you have twice as many backlinks as a competitor, this doesn’t mean your website is going to gain a more favourable position on Google in comparison. It’s all about the quality of the backlinks. As an example, 10 high-quality backlinks are going to help a website more than 50 low-quality ones. Fortunately, competitor analysis helps to reveal their backlink portfolio in full – so you know which external linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. are helping push them to the top of Google.
• Understand how to emulate their link building techniques: When you have identified backlink profiles that are worth emulating, it’s all about developing a strategy where you can earn the same backlinks for your website.

Before you start to consider a strategy to gain those all-important backlinks, however, you need to actually perform an analysis of your competitors.

How to execute a competitor backlink analysis

If you’re a newcomer to this type of research, you might believe this is a complicated process. Yet, in actuality, a backlink analysis is straightforward to complete with the assistance of Alexa Tools.

With Alexa Tools, you don’t have to put in much work on your end. In fact, even if you’re not aware of your competitors, the Audience Overlap Tool by Alexa can reveal that information for you. All that’s needed is the URL for your website. Add this to the system, run a report, and receive a list of similar websites that are targeting a similar audience. Pick out the most relevant competitors and save these for later.

Once you have these competitors, you can start analysing their main statistics – aka the number of backlinks they have and the authority of linking websites. With the Competitive Keyword Matrix by Alexa, you have the power to uncover which external sites are generating the most traffic for your competition.

The good news: you have learnt from the competition and gathered a healthy list of high-quality websites to target. The bad news: the hard work now begins.

The best link building strategy

If link building was easy, every website would have a plethora of quality backlinks pointing back to it. Yet a lot of work is involved if you want to build a strong backlink portfolio.

Thankfully, one of the biggest steps is taken care of by conducting a competitor analysis. This means you don’t have to research and locate linking opportunities all on your own, which can take considerable time and effort.

Yet even with this element out of the way, there are still plenty of other steps you need to take. You’ll already be aware of this if you have attempted link building in the past. For instance, if a website is offering high-quality white hat links, it’s unlikely they’re going to provide these out of the kindness of their heart. They will want something in return.

What they want, however, is dependent on each individual case. For some websites, they will happily accept backlinks in exchange for guest posts that add value to their own offerings. More authoritative websites might also demand a financial donation alongside a guest post.

If you do craft guest posts, it’s also not a case of simply splashing a few words down, adding your backlink at the bottom of the page, and reaping the benefits. If you want to maximise your link building strategies, you must follow the latest content creation guidelines. This means staying up-to-date with relevant keywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business. trends, implementing your backlink in the right place, producing content that is easy to scan for readers, etc.

Oh, and this isn’t a case of one and done. The entire process has to be replicated many times over, especially if you want to craft a backlink portfolio that will make a difference in the never-ending battle for real estate on Google’s first page of search results.

The extensive work involved is why link building services are popular with many businesses. With a link building service, you can sit back, let someone else perform a competitor analysis, identify the best websites, create blog posts, and develop a strong backlink portfolio in double-quick time.

If you require a bespoke link building service, don’t hesitate to get in touch!