5 Steps To Find Backlinks From Industry Competitors

A backlink is an external link from a website to your website. It tells Google and other search engines that your website is valued and trusted by other websites.

Backlinks can point to your homepage or any other page on your website. They are assessed by various metrics, such as Domain Authority or Domain Rating.

Backlinks can bring you both organic traffic and website authority.

1. Indeed, if the source website is visited, then your website may be reached thanks to the backlink. It’s traffic you wouldn’t have received otherwise.

2. In addition, if a backlink is qualified as DoFollow by its owner, then it will pass its authority to your website, which will improve significantly your website rankings in search engine results pages. This means more organic traffic.

Your website will rank higher with more backlinks from higher authoritative websites.

I describe all the ways to get backlilnks in my course “Competitor Off-Page SEO Audit: The Fastest Path To Link Building”.

Here are a few:

You can naturally wait and see if others discover your website by chance… or you can build your links proactively.

The most effective way to build backlinks is to analyze which backlinks your top competitors gained. The 5-step process below describes how.

You have direct competitors, indirect competitors, and SEO competitors.

For the sake of this article, we will only address direct industry competitors.

But you can use the 5 steps to analyze all your competitors, with a few accommodations.

You should already know your direct competitors, so list their names and their website URL.

Use Ahrefs Website “Authority” Checker to list the number of backlinks, referring domains, and the Domain Rating for each of your competitors.

Example for a graphic design website:

Note: I provide 6 Google Sheet templates in my course with automated formulas, as bonuses. Just fill-in Ahrefs’ data into the templates and read the calculation results.

They look like this:

You want to use as your SEO inspiration your competitor that seems to invest the most in SEO.

Select your top competitor doing SEO for backlink analysis.

1. Create a free account on BacklinkGap

2. Enter your selected competitor’s URL.

3. Eventually, export your competitor’s backlinks into a CSV file, and import it into Google Sheets.

Note that BacklinkGap limits to 3,000 backlinks the export feature. That’s plenty enough to analyze.

1. Focus on one backlink at a time.

2. For that backlink, check its:

The easiest way is to use the template from my course:

3. Decide if this backlink constitutes a link building opportunity, or not.

4. Move on to analyze the next backlink.

Now that you have a list of link building opportunities, select the link building activity you want to pursue first, and… let’s go!

For the complete and detailed process, check out my course “Competitor Off-Page SEO Audit: The Fastest Path To Link Building”.