Impossible to Emulate your Competitors Backlinks? Of course it is! But here some key ideas.

Backlinks – It’s hard for us SEO folks and much harder for regular folks to really spot opportunities from your competitors’ backlink profile. A lot of people talk about how you must analyze your competitors’ backlinks and try to see if you can emulate those same kinds of links.

The fact of the matter is if you don’t know what to look for, you won’t gather many actionable insights. Sameer covers some practical things you could do in this short article about how to find those patterns that you should look for when analyzing your competitors’ backlinks. 

If you’re looking for a decent tool for backlink analysis, then I’d suggest LinkMiner which is super affordable and if you have a higher budget, then SEMRush.

Transcript – 

How do you practically go about analyzing your competitors’ backlinks?

You see that it is a strategy, that, okay, they said – “Analyze your competitors’ backlinks and figure out what they are doing.

But actually, when you go about analyzing your competitors’ backlinks, you see a bunch of sites which seem impossible to get links from.

And it’s very realistic. You pick any competitor of yours, you’ll see sites and you’ll wonder okay that’s not possible for me. It doesn’t seem like, it seems very natural.

There are smarter ways to go about analyzing your competitors’ backlinks.

First, step no.1. Look at the kinds of sites that are linking back to your competitors.

So, when you go through a list of sites that your competitors are getting links from, you might find a trend.

So you might find that okay, they are getting links from certain blogs and now these blogs are mentioning them for some reason or the other.

I would say it might seem natural. but it may not necessarily be natural.

So, after getting links from blogposts, I would say investigate the author behind the blog post.

See who’s the person who’s written that blogpost. Because, I’ve also written a blogpost on this of what you can do using author’s spying.

So sometimes you might notice a trend. Okay 5 of these blogposts are actually written by just 2 authors who are actually related to the competitor in concern or they could be working for someone and they’ve actually built a relationship with that person and you can build a relationship with that same person to build a link for yourself.

So, if you’re looking at blog links, that your competitors obtained, I’d say try to either establish a relationship with those blogs or with the bloggers or contributors of that blogpost. Because that’s something that you can do easily.

Then usually you’ll find links where they’ve been mentioned on resource sites or sites which are listing lists of products and services.

So, those are platforms that you can easily obtain links from.

Then you might see that they are listed in sites where they sponsored a conference or an event. Now again, those are opportunitties that you can keep in mind.

But it may not necessarily be the case that you want to sponsor such an event.

But you might find that these people might host smaller events in other places and you could potentially for a fraction of the amount, trying to sponsor the smaller events and gain same amount of link equity.

When you do competitors’ backlink analysis, you’ve to think beyond just why they’ve got that link.

You’ve got to look at who’s giving the link, and why that person potentially gave that link.

Now there are many links and I’ll admit it there are many many many links where competitors would’ve got links naturally because of their brand, because of how they are and their market stature.

And you cannot do anything to avoid that. Such links sometimes you’ve got to accept that fact that till you built a brand being it up, you may not attract such links.

So that can be an aspiration for you that okay while you’re building your brand, you wanna keep those influences in mind or those people who have linked to your competitors.

And try to establish a relationship with them at this stage. You might be small. You might not be perfect fit for these influence.

You might be perfect fit for them to mention you right now.

But there is no harm in building relationship right now.

There is no harm in trying to follow them or comment valuably on their blgoposts or to follow them on Twitter or network with them on LinkedIn.

And when you have something useful and when you’re always hustling and always trying to build your brand, your service, your product, there will be a time and opportunity for you to connect with these people.

And that’s when you got to really leverage the network and the equity that you’ve built over time through the relationships.

So, a lot of link building is through the relationship building and that’s something that you don’t ignore. It’s a work in progress or constant work in progress.

So if I have to summarize, when you do competitors’ backlink research, you’re not going to spot opportunities very easily. I’ll admit it if it was easy, then everyone will be beating everyone out there.

It’s hard, and it’s hard for a reason. Because the majority of the links which are obtained through great, either great relationships or great content also that your competitors have developed.

And you cannot sometimes just overnight beat them. You’ve got to strategize and make up a plan basically.

So no.1 look for patterns, look for authors, look for contributors who’ve consistently mentioning your competitors.

Point no.2. Look for sponsorship opportunities, opportunities where you can possibly buy a way into getting a link.

And No.3. Try to build relationships even if those links look improbable for you to obtain at this point of time.

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Sameer Panjwani

Sameer Panjwani is the CEO & Founder of Mondovo.com.

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