Stealing Backlinks from competitors

An important aspect of SEO is content optimization and marketing that provides value to prospects/readers. And an important aspect of content marketing is link-building; since, without it we wouldn’t have known most content that we do right now.

Link-building is tedious, I know. I’ve been there, done that. It wasn’t long before I realized that it doesn’t have to be. And I’m sharing that exotic ingredient that went into the link-building recipe, that is,

“Stealing your competitor’s backlinks”

Follow this guide to learn how to analyze your competitor’s backlink profile and replicate their success.

To successfully implement all the things that you see in this guide you’ll need a backlink monitoring tool. I will illustrate these steps using Linkody backlink monitoring tool as it offers great value for your money and it’s really easy to use.

Finding your competitor’s backlinks

In order to look at your competitors’ backlinks you’ll first have to add them to your Linkody account along with your domain. You will do all that as part of the registration process and it’s very simple so I’m gonna skip over that part.

Once you’ve added your competitors, you can navigate to the Competitors section and select a competitor or view all their links at once. Then you’ll see a table of their backlinks metrics.

Here, you can see all the links and their metrics such as their relationship type, Moz metrics, etc. If you’ve added a new competitor, it will take a while to fetch all of their backlinks. After the initial fetch, you can see the links’ updates in real-time.

You can add one competitor in the free 30-day trial version. So, you can freely check it out if you’re interested.

Analyze their backlinks

Almost always, there’s someone with a similar niche or business to yours. They’ve also most likely had success with their business.

So why not make use of that?

All you need to do is go through the sites that links to your competitors, analyze them and get those sources to link you as well.

Sounds great eh? Let me show you how it’s done.

Just a little tip before that, select your backlink sources meticulously; don’t settle for mediocre sources just for getting backlinks. Remember quality > quantity.

You’d want to start with the defined filters such as relationship types or links sources.

You can select whether you want to see only follow type links or nofollow type links or both.

Next thing you’d want to filter is the backlink sources on whether they’re shared by you and your competitor or they’re exclusive to your competitor.

When you view all pages, shared link is shown in green colored rows.

This is how you can find and select a list of unshared links that you want to reach out to get them to link to you too.

There’s one more way to analyze your competitors backlinks and that is by searching for specific types of links in the search field.

Let me describe a few different ways you can use these filters in unison.

1) Finding roundups

Search for “roundup”, filter in follow type links and not shared domains:

By doing this you can find ideas and places to add yourself to a roundup or do a roundup yourself. This is one of the proven ways to making yourself known in your industry especially when you’re a beginner.

2) Finding tool lists

Search for “tools”, “lists”, “top tools”, or other similar terms, filter in not shared domains:

As you can see, there are over 12k links after filtering. Of course, not all of it are tools lists; but, there are still hundreds of pages with tools lists.

This is also a great of letting yourself get discovered in your industry; by having your product in tools lists. Just be careful while selecting sites as to not get yourself on a crappy list with crappy products.

3) Finding reviews

Search for “review”, filter in follow type links and not shared domains:

This is likely the best scenario. Regardless of what product or service you offer, you could certainly use good reviews to drive customers your way. If you manage to get your product or service reviewed by one of the big players, you’d get invaluable returns (and profits).

Unlike roundups where your product is only described in a paragraph or two, reviews are much more detailed and are helpful to the readers.

4) Finding guest blogging opportunities

Search for “blog” in URLs and filter in follow type links:

You don’t need to select only not shared domains here as you can post more than just one guest post on blogs.

Most of us if not all, use guest blogging to get a couple backlinks to our own sites and pages. Based on experience, guest blogging is one of the frequently used rewards for requesting backlinks. And it really does work.

Note: Be sure to use the search filter settings correctly to maximize your useful results.

These are just a few instances of how you can analyze your competitors’ backlinks and it’s only limited by your imagination. If you think you’ve found anything cool, feel free to share it.

Getting those links for yourself

And finally, after filtering, sorting, analyzing, and verifying you’ve tailored a long list of backlink sources you want to approach and request.

By the way, in Linkody, you can add a link you’re interested in right from the list of links.

After adding prospective links (which appear in a faded red shade), you can download that list as a CSV so that you can further sort and filter using softwares like Microsoft Excel.

Just one last step and that is to create an email outreach to contact those sources to guest blog, request backlinks or reviews, etc.

While creating the outreach you’d want to follow the skyscraper techniques pitch template. Those kind of pitches usually get the most responses.

For email campaigns you can use tools like Ninja Outreach that find emails of site admins, owners, editors, and so on. Ninjaoutreach and similar tools let you send emails and automatically scheduled follow-ups. They also report on email metrics such as open rate and allow you to group and tag emails.

Now it’s time to get those backlinks.

In Conclusion

Today we learnt that linkbuilding doesn’t have to be as hard as it’s generally perceived. Thanks be to our competitors, ironically!

You can get plenty of backlinks by analyzing your competitors’ backlink profiles and replicating them. Doing that can be summed up in three steps:

• Find a list of competitors
• Analyze their backlinks and their metrics
• Reaching out to get a list of those backlinks you like

All it needs is a little push to get started and once you do, you’ll be counting your hundreds and thousands of backlinks. Simple enough? Then get those links; get them now!