Powerful Backlink Opportunities Through Competitor Analysis

In our content, we will talk about identifying sites that will have an impact due to competitor analysis, rather than answering questions such as what is a backlink and why it is important. First of all, we should not think that every link received will bring traffic or clicks to our site. Because backlinks are a link purchase, but they are strategic studies planned in the right link types to transfer page value (PageRank) to our site. Of course, some creative work can bring traffic to the site. But we should not think that it should definitely bring traffic or contribute traffic regularly. In this regard, you can examine the methods of obtaining backlinks naturally, which we have mentioned before.

Backlinks to our site can also occur outside of our control. Many tools detect these sites, and the data provided by each tool has different implications and usage areas. Now, let's examine the details.

Identification of Competitors

While competitors in every sector are different from each other, we should know that your digital competitors may be different from what you expect. For this, you can look at the sites listed in the target 5-10 keywords. Let's identify common domains listed in target keywords. Then let's visit these sites and evaluate our site with the services or products on their pages. Finally, in the final case, it will be enough to take note of 5 competitor site information other than your site.

If your site is multilingual, it will be more useful to identify separate competitors in target countries. In this way, we can identify and include sites that directly target the relevant country market.

Detection of External Links to Competitors that Our Site Does Not Have

After identifying the competitors, we can start the analysis with the tools, to examine the metrics of the relevant sites. For this, SEO agencies and experts prefer backlink tools. We recommend that you choose whichever of these tools you find the data it offers to be meaningful. Let's start our analysis with the Ahrefs tool, which was intended for backlink usage when it first came out. 

For this, we will use the competition analysis module of Ahrefs. To use this module, our website must be set up as a project. We cannot continue the analysis for the domain name that is not set up as a project. We select our website and then add competitor domains.

The screen that appears presents us with a lot of data. It is very important to consider how we should make a connection between this data. Because you have to decide what your main goal is in the backlink strategy. Here we will prioritize the backlinks obtained in the dofollow link type in our strategy. In this, it will be valuable to closely analyze the links from competitor sites that our site does not have. In our related analysis, let's shape our strategy through the metric we can call intersection, domain authority, which appears as DR, and the traffic data metrics of the relevant domain.

Common Features and Grouping of Related List

While our related module page is open, let's make this document actionable via Google Sheets. 

In our document in Google Sheets, we mentioned that we will shape our strategy based on the metric we can call intersection, domain authority, which appears as DR, and related domain traffic data metrics. Let's discuss this part in a little more detail.

Intersection

It refers to the number of links your competitors are directing to your website through natural or purchased backlinks. If many of the sites that your competitors are linking to are not backlinking to you, this is a strategic warning. *Low intersection* means that competitors are not getting backlinks from the same sources, increasing diversity. High intersection here can mean a more valuable situation.

Domain Name Authority (DR)

It is a metric that measures the credibility and authority of the website. If your website's domain authority is lower than competitors or if you can't get backlinks from high domain authority sites relevant to your industry, this can negatively affect your SEO success. Low domain authority can mean that search engines may consider your site less trustworthy.

Organic Traffic

Together with intersection and domain authority, it gives us an approximation of the organic traffic data of the site you are not getting backlinks from. This helps us understand how much traffic that site is getting and how much potential there is in your backlink strategy.

In light of this information, we can use these three metrics to categorize competitor data into different categories. Making a grouping here will create a force multiplier in our strategy, that is, backlink efforts will contribute to SEO success by creating a multiplier effect.

Identification and Analysis of Common Links

After detailing the common features of the relevant list, we should first closely examine the domains with the most intersection data in a strategic sense. The authority and estimated traffic data of the domains with the highest intersection set should also provide support while creating our study. While closely examining these domains, we will look at which web address (URL) the competitor sites from our relevant module page, which is open on the side, and how they obtain backlinks with the positioning on this page.

We add the inferences we get from the data provided by the Ahrefs tool as a sample URL in our Google Sheets document. While this URL will help us decide which sites to contact in the final stage, it will also give us access to sample content where competitors get backlinks.

In the final list, we can analyze in detail before contacting the relevant sites. In this analysis, we can make pinpoint choices in our strategy by examining the change in traffic data in recent years, the number of links leaving the site, the types of links, the relevance of the pages on the site. In this way, we will take action to support the current SEO performance of our site by identifying backlink opportunities that create a force multiplier effect with competitor analysis.

In summary, in this article, we aimed to obtain backlinks from sites with high domain authority and high sectoral relevance with the help of backlink tools. You can make it more effective by adding or subtracting to the method used. You can perform analysis with similar steps with the tools other than the tool I used in my article. While developing the backlink strategy, we can also make backlink opportunities a part of the strategy with Google Alerts, which we mentioned earlier.