How to Do a Basic Backlink Analysis on Your Competitors

Key Takeaways

in this video I'm gonna show you how to do a basic backlink analysis on your competitors websites stay tuned what's up guys samo here with HRF so today's video is about analyzing your competitors websites and web pages to uncover actionable link building opportunities for your own site if you're an experienced SEO when I'm about to share with you in the next few minutes may seem somewhat basic but there will be two follow-up videos with advanced techniques that you're gonna love and I promise you this by the end of the series there are two things that you're gonna be able to do the first is to be able to analyze any website and uncover potentially thousands of link prospects and the second thing is that we're gonna speed up your link building efficiency using some really really cool hacks that you may not be using it so let's jump right in first we'll go to site explorer and enter in a domain or URL that you want to analyze so I'll use the domain Content Marketing Institute com for our example here you'll see a top-level view of the website you're analyzing and since we're just focusing on backlink analysis and link building throughout this series we're just gonna talk about these two metrics here backlinks and referring domains you can see that content marketing institute has almost two million backlinks with almost 23,000 referring domains but you might have noticed that right below there's mention of recent and historical these three numbers represent our three backlink indexes the live index contains all links that were live on our last recrawl which tells you that they're almost certainly live right now our recent index contains all live links plus lost backlinks that were removed within the past 90 days or so so this can mean anything from the web site having temporary downtime when we last crawled it or the web site no longer existing at all finally is the historical index and these contain the history of all links dead or alive and this is the reason why each link index is bigger than the next if we scroll down a bit then you'll see a few interactive graphs that show you the dynamics of link acquisition over time both for the number of referring domains and referring pages and there are a few filters you can use here too by default you'll see the growth over the last year but you can narrow this down to the last 30 days or look at an all-time view to see how each website has done over time these graphs are the most useful when you compare another website to its side by side and this will reveal the site or URL that's more effective at acquiring backlinks so if I go back to site Explorer we can do an apples-to-apples comparison of another website in the content marketing industry I'll use Copyblogger comm as our comparison site if we look at these side-by-side you'll notice that CMI has had consistent year to year link growth well copy bloggers link acquisition has been a little bit stagnant especially in the past couple of years when you find websites that seem to acquire links at a fast pace these are totally worth deeper analysis which is exactly what we'll be doing in the next couple of videos in this graph we're looking at an overall domain comparison but if you compare URLs of two pieces of content on a similar topic you'll instantly see which page is more popular with link acquisition this is a quick five to 10 second analysis you can do before you actually jump into the individual backlinks reports so I highly recommend doing this alright the last graphs on this page that we'll be covering today are the new and lost referring domains and backlinks graphs these graphs show you a non cumulative view of a website or a URLs backlink growth the cool thing with this graph is that you can quickly scan for spikes that will help you identify new link worthy pages that your competitors are creating and it's gonna help you reverse engineer link building strategies or campaigns that were implemented over a specific period of time I'll have a really cool example for you of two titans fighting for the keyword SEO in the next video the last thing that I want to show you in this basic backlink analysis is the referring domains report if you look to the sidebar and click on referring domains you'll see a table that shows you all of the unique linking websites to this target domain that we're analyzing right now now if the site has a ton of referring domains manually reviewing it will be near impossible so in this case you need to use some of the filters in this report to narrow down the results so the first thing I would do when I hit this table is to set the link type filter to do follow to find only the domains that are passing link hoody all of these columns are sortable so if we sort by the number of do follow links in descending order you'll notice some websites link to CMI hundreds of thousands of times normally when you see a ton of backlinks from a single referring domain it means that they're site-wide links if we click the number of backlinks from InformationWeek com you can see all of the pages some key metrics in the anchor slash backlink that was created and right away we can tell that this is a site-wide link without even clicking through to a page since the anchor text and the backlink URL are all the same finally is this cool search filter you can just type in a domain and see if it's linking to the target website or URL so I'll type in HFS comm and you'll see that we have linked to CMI eleven times and if we click on the number of backlinks we've created for them you can get more details on where the backlinks are coming from and where they're pointing to with a website as popular as Content Marketing Institute that has a good number of backlinks and referring domains it's tough to get a ton of value here but I'll finish off by showing you how easy it is to filter through small websites using the referring domains report so I'm gonna enter in a very unpopular domain in site Explorer money journal com yeah it's mine now I'll click on the referring domains report in the left sidebar then I'll filter down to just the do follow links and you can see that there are a few decent links in here from some heidi our web sites which tells us that i'm not blatantly using any shady link building tactics and we can click on this number here beside entrepreneur comm which again will show me some more details on the backlinks and linking pages so i could even reach out to these peoples to start building a relationship with them right now i'll open this one up in a new tab oh it's just me but you get the point with smaller web sites you can quickly use the referring domains report to see whether our websites link building strategies are legit and worth replicating or if you should just move on to your next backlink analysis that's it for part 1 of our backlink analysis and link building series make sure to hit the thumbs up button and subscribe to our channel for more actionable videos on SEO and marketing if you have any questions make sure to leave a comment otherwise it's time to move on to part two where we'll be taking this backlink analysis a step deeper and getting into some actionable insights I'll see you in the next video [Music]