Step by step guide to competition backlink analysis
As you run your business, it is always important to acknowledge that you have competitors. However, if you are not sure about what your competitors are doing to beat you in business, you will have a difficult time choosing the right marketing strategies. Therefore, doing a competitor analysis does a lot of good for your business for it not only gives you a clue on what you are supposed to do with SEO, but also keeps on the loop about what your competitors are up to. One of the most important parts of knowing what your competitors are doing is conducting a competitor backlink analysis. Below, we will look at step by step guide on how to do a competitor backlink analysis.
Break down your top 4 competitors
If your motive is to place your company amongst the top 4 in the industry, then you should line your company against the trending metrics and the averages of the top companies. This will reveal areas that your company is weak in and thus, make plans for improvement.
Look at the linked root domains
As you may know, the number of linked root domains goes hand in hand with a high ranking of a site. You need to look at the sites that link to your competitor’s websites. However, it is advisable to choose the links that connect to multiple competitors. If you want to rank higher, you should consider adding backlinking from the top site that link with your competitors. That way, you are going to raise the standing of your site online. In addition, linking to an authority site that ranks high on search engines is going to improve the standing of your brand. By associating your site with some of the biggest names online, you will get better brand recognition.
Create a link portfolio
If you want to rank high in search engines, you need a large portfolio of links. Therefore, it is important to use special tools to analyze a large number of links that are connected to your top competitors. Unlike overstuffing keywords, Google is forgiving to those who over link their sites. However, it is important to avoid overlinking with the same anchor text. Sadly, there are people who aggressively use the same anchor text in over 70% of their links. This is going to be flagged by Google and thus, you will not gain much from the strategy.
Profile the links
After getting a list of the sites that your competitors have linked to, it is now time to profile the links according to their relevance. You can check the relevance of the links from their search engine ranking. List the sites according to how popular they are on search engines before shortlisting to the number that you wish to work with. Generally, you focus on metrics such as anchor text, anchor text distribution, on-site targeting, and link quality. Although your site might be ranking high on a search engine, it may lack the balance on the above parameters. Therefore, profiling the links is a very important step in competition backlink analysis.
You can use tools such as SEOmoz API to pull out a list of keywords from your competitors before saving in a text file. After that, upload the text file into another tool such as Tagxedo. Doing so will highlight the major target terms and reveals the distribution of the anchor text.
Identify links with the highest growth rate
The next step in competition backlink analysis is the identification of links with the highest growth rate. Such links are going to have the biggest impact on the growth of your site since they are active on the internet. You should, however, have the right tools that will guide you through this process. For example, you can use MajesticSEO which will provide graphs on different links. With this, you can be able to identify the link with the biggest potential for growth.
Conclusion
Competition backlink analysis is an important process that helps in identifying backlinks that are working best for your competitors. That way, you are able to learn what your competitors are doing and thus, establish the right strategies to beat your competition. However, you need to have the right tools and knowledge on the issue so that you can get the best results. Today, competition backlink analysis has enabled many businesses to get ahead of the competition. This is because when you know the tactics that your competitor is using, you are able to plan yourself better.