How to Spy on Your Competitor’s Backlinks to Skyrocket your Business

Believe it or not, it’s possible to increase traffic to your website without doing a lot of work. In fact, it’s possible to leverage the work of your competition to increase your own web traffic. Best of all, this is not a difficult task. All it takes is a few simple tools and as little time to get your website’s traffic off of the sidewalk and put it back on the freeway. Luckily, there are plenty of tools to help you achieve this. However, they must be used correctly and the strategies must be executed properly in order to achieve maximum results.

The Process

Spying on your competition is not as hard as you think it might be. However, there is a simple process that you can follow that will give you foolproof results if you follow them correctly. Luckily, there are tools that you can use along the way to help you get the information you need to effectively spy on your competition. Many backlink tools will give you the option to export a list of all of these backlinks, however, not all of them do. If you use a tool that doesn’t create a list for you focus on the backlinks with the highest Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) ranks. Remember to start small to avoid becoming overwhelmed. The idea is to go after your competitors’ best backlinks and concentrate on replicating these links. In essence, you are stealing your competitors’ top-performing links.

1. Get a copy of your competitors’ link profiles.
2. Start with your two biggest competitors.
3. Use a backlink tool and type in the competitor URL you want to gather links from.
4. Use the backlinks under the “Inbound Links” heading.

Use a Backlink Analysis Tool

The first step in this process is determining which backlinks your competition is using that are working to help drive traffic to their site. Those are the backlinks that you need to use to get your lions share of traffic to your site. However, all backlinks aren’t created equal.
Determine which backlinks are generating the most traffic.

Ahrefs: Backlink Checker with the largest available backlink index.

Ahrefs is an even more effective tool when it comes to uncovering the competitions top performing backlinks. This tool has 12 trillion available links that are updated every 15 minutes and the tool comes with a guide. The guide outlines how to use the software to get competitors’ links. In fact, Ahref’s can help you keep up with your competition if you utilize all its features. It keeps you up to date with the competition and eliminate the need to discover effective backlinks.

Moz’s Open Site Explorer (OSE): 

Exposes the most important backlinks of your competition.Set up backlink alerts that can be emailed to you weekly with new backlinks from your competitors.

Focus on the Most Effective Backlinks

The most effective backlinks will be the ones with the highest Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) rankings. Your goal should be to focus on effectively replicating these links. In essence, your goal should be to nab your competitors’ top-performing links. You can go a step further by finding your competitors’ recurring link sources or acquiring entire link profiles from your competitors.

Analyze the Links

It takes more than just uncovering high performing backlinks to increase your site’s traffic. These links must be analyzed. There are a few steps that you should take to make sure the links you discover will be effective. However, once you’ve taken these steps you can feel confident that you will have a list of healthy backlinks from the site you’ve gathered. Remember to start small. Focus on no more than 10 of the best backlinks from any one site based on the backlink tool you have used to uncover the best links.

• Don’t use a link profile that’s not being indexed.
• Discover the most toxic links so you know which ones to avoid
  Make sure the site is actually being indexed by Google.

Use a White Hat Technique to Organize Your Efforts and Boost SEO: Create a Spreadsheet

Create a master spreadsheet by taking all the links you’re focusing on and copy them into a spreadsheet. There should be no more 10-20 backlinks from two competitors. This will give you an effective list of backlinks from the sites you’ve audited. Create two additional columns and label them “replicated” and “link.” Remember to try to use the same technique your competitor used.

• Replicated column: Record whether or not you were able to replicate that particular backlink type.
• Link column: Paste the backlink you successfully replicated

Explore All Your Options

Keep in mind that there are lots of ways sites get links, so familiarize yourself with all of them. If a competitors site routinely gets backlinks through blog comments and discussion forum posts, you should follow the lead.

• Join the conversation and give yourself a backlink.
• Provide value-based content for your audience when you’re attempting to replicate a backlink.

It’s no secret that Google rewards pages that have excellent link profiles. The ability to land on page one of the search engine results is a real accomplishment and speaks volumes. However, the biggest benefit that your competition can provide for you is the details of all their hard-earned backlinks without you having to create them yourself. They have done a lot of hard work that you can use to your strategic advantage.

Best of all, you would have done nothing more than use a few well-placed tools to help you collect important information about the competition’s backlinks. Plus, you’re not only capturing the excellent backlinks of one competitor, you are capturing them all. This, in turn, can help you build a profile that contains all the best backlinks from all your competitors.