| Last updated: December 28, 2017
When a newbie launches a website to push a business online, he or she knows for sure that one of the leading priorities is getting more search traffic. Unfortunately, it is merely possible for the websites that have just been born.
Likely, there is no need for reinventing the wheel. Go ahead and use your competitors to get juiciest backlinks and replicate them. It is the key to get the traffic you need.
The only thing you should know is a few leading competitors in your niche. Afterwards, follow the steps I am going to introduce you to in this post.
Let’s start!
- Spy on Your Competitors and Know About Each Their Step:
‘Spying’ on the competitors you have is a kind of a complex game, where you need to use different ‘tricks.’ You must know about the latest updates your competitors have. It is hard to do manually. Fortunately, you can set up alerts in Ahrefs to get a full report daily/weekly/monthly.
There are three basic types of alerts:
- Backlink alerts:
This alert sends a list of new backlinks your competitors gained for the particular period. You’ll get a notification on your email with the backlinks Ahrefs has discovered for a specific domain.
- Brand mentions:
In a case you’ve missed some opportunity, you can set up alerts for each competitor’s brand names. This alert will show you if these brands have been mentioned somewhere.
- New keywords:
The third type of alerts allows you to track new keywords your competitors might use. Do the same steps to set up this type of alert and get the notification on your mail when you need.
2. Search for Sites That Link to More Than One Competitor:
There are cases when a particular website links to a couple of competitors you would like to get a link as well. However, the question is how to find these competitors?
It’s as easy as pie!
Link Intersect tool from Ahrefs will be handy for this.
Now, let’s skim through the process:
- Go to Link Intersect tool and put up to ten competitor domains into it.
- Now click on “show link opportunities” button and see how many domains that link to three main competitors but don’t link to Ahrefs will be found.
You can see 1, 678 domains that don’t link to Ahrefs. If you need more results, you should choose “any of the below targets” option and voila:
These results are sorted by a number of intersects. And pay attention to the fact that all these domains don’t link to the website I need.
Now check all the opportunities you got and find the backlinks you need.
3. Run Through Your Competitor’s Branded Home Page Links:
You might have already noticed that the process of searching link-building opportunities contains lots of links. It seems hard to proceed with all these links when there are thousands of them.
Likely, it is not a problem anymore if you use Ahrefs Site Explorer tool.
- Put your competitor’s URL to the tool and go to “anchors” report (make sure you set the filter to “URL.”)
- Keep an eye on naked or branded URLs. Afterwards, go to “Details/Referring Domains” to see sites for each branded domain. Find the opportunities you need.
Remember that you can always export the results into a spreadsheet.
4. Make a Search for Competitor’s Guest Posts:
Guest blogging is still one of the proven ways to build links. Hence, you can get lots of competitor’s links following this strategy.
Here are a few tactics how to find these opportunities.
- With the help of Google:
The first place where you should start your search is Google search. Just use this simple formula, and you’ll get what you need.
“Author name” + “guest post” -site:competitordomain.com -site:https:twitter.com
I would like to give you an example using the name of Rand Fishkin a wizard of Moz.
Here are the results:
- ‘Author page’ search:
Yes, it is the second version of a search query. However, it will bring some more results.
Use the following formula “Author name” + inurl:author
- Image search:
This method helps you find content that contains author’s headshot. The only thing you need is a person’s image.
- Ahrefs Content Explorer:
This tool is ready to provide you with the results regarding a query like author:”Author name”
5. Looking for Competitor’s Most Shared Content:
Practice shows that the most shared content is evergreen usually. I am sure you are familiar with the meaning of ‘evergreen’ content, and there is no need to go into detail on this matter.
The strategy you should follow is “find your competitor’s most popular content – create something even better – promote it.”
The question is how to find competitor’s best content?
It is easy to do with the help of Site Explorer tool from Ahrefs.
Let me show how to do it in a couple of simple steps.
- Content with a massive amount of backlinks to your competitor:
You can find this option with the help of “Best by links” tab in Site Explorer tool.
- Content best by shares:
This option can be found in the same column as the previous one.
6. Check out and Fix Competitor’s Broken Links:
Another cool way to get backlinks is by searching broken links pointing to your competitors. Once these links are found, you can reach out to bloggers and replace this broken link with your own material on the same topic.
To find these links, go to “Broken backlinks” report using Site Explorer tool.
You will have to look attentively to find opportunities that are worth your efforts.
Over to You:-
I’ve just covered six ways of swiping competitor’s backlinks with the help of a single tool. You can see that it is not as hard as it may seem. Furthermore, you’ll get a chance to find some interesting ideas for your content to impress your audience.
Don’t shy away from using these techniques to make your website rank better.
If you found this article useful, don’t hesitate to share it on your social media channels.
Don’t forget to comment it as well!
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About Author:
Sergey Aliokhin is a Marketing Manager at Ahrefs. Apart from working at Ahrefs he likes spending his time with family, studying martial arts and plucking fat bass guitar strings.