How to Run a Competitive Link Analysis and Discover New Opportunities
Steve Wiideman
SEO Consultant | Multi-Location Search Expert | Educator | Speaker | Nerd | SEO Strategy + PPC Strategy - Helping Brands Appear Where it Matters Most | Follow #SEOSteve!
What is a Competitive Link Analysis? In simplest terms, it’s a way to find your competitors backlinks and get insight to how/where your competitors and the industry are gaining links.
Why Should You Run a Link Analysis?
Running a link analysis allows you to find domains that link to your competitors but aren’t linking to your domain, it also could give you a higher chance of finding domains that are relevant to your business for other types of marketing and advertising.
Other reasons to run a link analysis:
- It gives you a full list of link building opportunities
- You can get an idea of where the industry is getting links
- Helps you understand your competitors and their strategies for link building
The first step in a competitive analysis is to gather a list your competitors. The best way to do this is to perform a Google search for:
- Direct Competitors
- Local Competitors
- Industry Influencers
- Sites that are ranking for industry leading keywords
The next steps are going to be based on the number of competitors you find to be relevant to your business. For this blog post, we decided to use Ahrefs; (There are other tools such as Moz, SEMRush, MajesticSEO, CognitiveSEO, etc.). Ahrefs allows you to run a direct link intersect report up to 10 domains. If you gather more than 10 you will have to run a backlink link report for each one of the domains separately and run them through a pivot table to get the same results; which may be overwhelming to those less experienced in Microsoft Excel.
Check out our website to get the full description on how to run competitive analysis in both ways.