Building a website for your business is a lot of work. Creating detailed pages that not only look good but also effectively market your product or service can require knowledge outside of your usual skill set. In many cases, getting to the grips of using your website as a marketing tool can help business owners market their business effectively.
However, as you progress through the world of SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, you might find yourself wanting to free up some of your time and get outside help.
One such task is competitor research. Competitor research is a vital method used by business owners and SEO experts where they look into the marketing strategies of their nearest competitors to target areas which may have been missed. Competitor research can help you fill the gap between you and your competitors’ marketing campaigns. However, a particular area of competitor research where most businesses need help from trained SEOs is competitor backlink research.
So what exactly is ‘competitor backlink research/ analysis’, and should businesses research these backlinks at all?
Researching your competitor’s backlinks benefits your business as good backlinks show trustworthiness for your site. In fact, they are reportedly the third most valuable ranking factor for Google. Therefore, gaining backlinks from competitors would be a valuable task for anyone wanting to bridge the gap and get their business punching above its weight online.
As SEO specialists, we often research the backlinks of competitors for businesses as this helps identify external linking opportunities in market niches. If your competitors have attained valuable backlinks, then these opportunities are likely available to you too and could offer a ‘quick win’ opportunity for you to build a strong backlink profile.
Let’s take a closer look at backlinks, building a backlink profile, and how reviewing your competitors’ backlinks can improve your online presence and help you catch up to your competitors using SEO tips, tricks, and tools.
First, to read up on Competitor Research, why not read What is Competitor Research And How To Do It?
Competitor research may seem sneaky at first, however, it is very common in marketing to see how others take their products or services to market. You can then use your findings to inform your strategy and identify areas of development within your own strategy.
Backlinks are important as they offer something referred to as ‘link juice’ for websites. This is where one website shares its authority with another.
Getting backlinks for a website offers the website:
Getting backlinks for your website is incredibly important. Not only due to other users coming to your site from the referring site, but it also helps search engines find your site and share authority with the referring domain.
Backlinks can also have a negative impact on your site, too. If a high authority site refers to a site with very poor authority, then it may have a negative effect on the higher authority site. Domain authority is therefore only portioned out between trusted domains.
Read more about domain authority with What is Domain Authority and How can I Increase it?
When looking for a competitor, we are looking for a business in our niche that may regularly appear above you in Search Results.
You will likely be aware of who these competitors are. Once you have found your competition online, you are going to find good backlinks within your competitor’s site which link to authoritative domains that may also share their authority with you. We’ll explain what we mean by ‘authoritative domains’ in a minute. First, let’s find your nearest competitor.
Not all links are created equally. Some links on websites are created with a ‘no follow’ attribute which tells website crawlers to not follow the link and inspect what is on the other side. In this case, that’s our website.
Whilst these links don’t offer as much ‘link juice’ as links with a ‘follow’ attribute, they are still somewhat valuable to your site and improve its authority.
Many high authority sites will offer ‘no-follow’ links to lower authority sites to help keep their own authority intact. In these instances, you may want to find other links which offer a ‘follow’ link.
Once we have found authoritative referring domains, we will build it into our SEO strategy to reach out to these domains in an attempt to gain a backlink ourselves. We may do this by writing content for them or offering to feature some of their products on our site in exchange for a backlink in return.
We talk about reaching out with PR opportunities a little more further down in this article, as well as in our recent post ‘Does the SEO Skyscraper Technique Still Work?’
So, using software such as SEMrush, we are going to find gaps between one of our clients, Northern Willow and some competitors in their field.
Northern Willow is an all-natural, handmade wicker basket company based in the UK. For our purposes, we will find competitors within this niche. Later, we will find high-ranking non-competitive publications and websites to earn a backlink from them.
To better understand how we are going to find our competitors, the business owner may already know what their major competitors are. However, you can quickly find your nearest competitors in terms of keywords by using SEMrush’s domain analysis tool. This will give us this graphic.
Based on Northern Willow’s Organic Keyword Rankings, we can identify that ‘The Basket Company’ is a competitor that we want to ideate towards. We will use them as our competitor, although you might want to add 2 or 3 more competitors to find better backlinks which can be gained.
After checking out The Basket Company further (a five-minute browse on their site), we can see that they offer a similar service to Northern Willow. They offer similar products, at similar prices, and their site speed is similar to that of Northern Willow. So what gives?
One way in which websites gain better rankings is through domain authority, a score given by search engines based on a number of factors and which is shared by domains when they link to each other.
Domain Authority is a score given by search engines to full website domains based on how authoritative they are with reference to all other domains known to that search engine.
A high-ranking domain may be Apple.com, whilst a low-ranking domain may be a used mobile phone shop in your local market. True, they both sell iPhones, but which one is Google or other search engines going to see as the authority on the new Apple iPhone when you are linking in your content?
Just like with academic papers, or even Wikipedia, referencing highly authoritative sources gives provenance to that source and to the article you are reading or writing.
A site like BBC News would only link to very good sources on rumours surrounding the release of a new iPhone, so the Apple website gets authority by being linked by a high authority source and gains a share of this authority itself.
With this in mind, we aren’t just targeting any and all backlinks for our SEO campaign, we are going to target those backlinks which can give us authority within our niche.
The Domain Authority for Northern Willow currently is 12.
The Domain Authority for The Basket Company is currently 30
Next, let’s look at the Domain Authority for some of the referring domains for each website to see how they compare.
Get to know more about domain authority with our blog What is Domain Authority and How can I Increase it?
As mentioned, referring domains share some of their domain authority with the site it is referring to. As such, we would want to look out for and make a note of all the referring domains which have a high domain authority score. We can use SEMrush’s Backlink Gap tool to see all referring domains to our competitors and sort by Authority Score.
Using SEMrush, we see that our competitor has attained backlinks from publications such as The Telegraph, Cosmopolitan, Country Living, and The Evening Standard as well as a few others.
These are all great publications with high authority. Let’s use Country Living as an example and reach out to them for a backlink.
Country Living is a high-authority publication that we might wish to pursue. They fit our basket company well, and they target similar niches and similar members of the general public that we do.
Now, we can review the way that they produce content or offer services and see if we can find a gap to request a valuable backlink.
We can potentially gain a backlink by offering them an interesting article written for their website or magazine around our mutual interests. This may take the form of a blog or article outlining ‘7 Stylish Uses Of Wicker Around The Modern British Home’. In this blog, we will link to our website in several different instances.
Read our Blog ‘How Do You Optimise a Blog For SEO?’
Once you have conducted your competitor backlink audit, may want to plan out your PR campaign so that you:
From here, your article will be published on another highly authoritative website and your tactically placed backlinks will feed users and crawlers towards your website.
Sometimes, the article may go live altered without any backlinks linking to your site, or the links will be ‘nofollow’. Depending on your relationship with the editor or webmaster who runs the referring domain, this may be an easy fix. Simply reach out to the publication again and ask to change or add links to the content.
From here, your site will potentially increase its domain authority which improves its search engine rankings. From this. you may notice an increase in the Key Events that your website tracks as a part of its online performance and health.
Here at Wildcat Digital, we are experienced in researching our clients’ competition and gaining valuable backlinks into potential areas where our client’s businesses could flourish.
In the previous year, we have gained many backlinks for our clients in regional and niche publications for their specialist areas, as well as articles in international publications such as The Independent, I Magazine and many others.
Gaining these backlinks can help your business grow in its online presence, and could provide a new marketing avenue, leading to more custom through your website, but they also vastly improve the health of your site through improved domain authority. For more insights into marketing effectively online, contact us at Wildcat Digital today.
