Daily Archives: February 18, 2022

Can You Find Competitor Backlinks With Ahrefs? | What To Know

Find-Competitor-Backlinks

If you are struggling to find backlink opportunities for your website, there is a way you can steal your competitors’ backlinks with Ahrefs.

Backlinks still remain one of the most important aspects of SEO when it comes to having a direct impact on ranking improvements.

In this article, we will go into depth on how specifically you can steal your competitors’ backlinks using Ahrefs and help increase the overall authority of your website.

What is the importance of finding competitor backlinks?

  1. What is the importance of finding competitor backlinks?
  2. How do I see competitors backlinks in Ahrefs?
  3. What is domain rating Ahrefs?
  4. What can you do with competitor backlink information?
  5. See how competitive your niche is
  6. Try to win those backlinks yourself
  7. Is Ahrefs free to use for finding competitor backlinks?
  8. Conclusion

Backlinks still remain one of the most important ranking factors and are a primary signal to Google to show your authority within a niche.

Having the strongest and most relevant backlinks pointed to your site will help Google understand what it is your website is offering and is a big trust signal to help you rank for your target keywords. Say you are a marketing agency and you have backlinks from other big publications within the marketing industry, it will show Google that you are getting a lot of coverage on sites that are relevant to your readers.

In terms of finding your competitors backlinks, if there are some big websites that you are aware of within your niche, the chances are is that they have good organic presence and ultimately, quality links from other websites.

If you are able to source the websites that are linking to your competitors and reach out to them, it can be a great way to win quality links that have helped your competitors rank for the phrases you are looking to target.

what url structure looks like

How do I see competitors backlinks in Ahrefs?

Ahrefs has a number of useful features including backlink analysis which allows you to spy on your competitors backlink information.

In order to find your competitors backlinks in Ahrefs, you will need to follow these steps:

  1. Set up an account – if you haven’t already, you will need to set up an account with Ahrefs. They offer a 7 day trial for $7 which allows you to pretty much use all of the functionality available with the Ahrefs tool.
  2. Once set up, using the site explorer function in the dashboard, you can then search for your competition using their domain name and use this to check competitor backlinks.
  3. When your competitor domain information appears, you can then select “Backlinks” which will then reveal all of the backlinks that are linking to your competitor.
  4. You can then simply export all of the backlinks to a CSV which will provide you with all of the backlink information including domain information, referring domains and the backlink page information.

Note: You can also use the “link intesect” tool which allows you to review multiple domains at once and find the backlink gaps where your website is not linking to.

What is domain rating Ahrefs?

Domain rating is an Ahrefs metric that scores the quality of a domain based on how strong its backlink profile is.

It scores from 0 to 100, with 0 being a site with little to no authority to 100 which would be the likes of Facebook and Youtube – websites with millions and millions of referring domains pointing at their site.

Domain rating is a fairly important metric as it pretty much tells you how strong a website is and how valuable it would be if you were to get a backlink from this website.

When you have exported your competitor backlinks, you can sort by domain rating and this will sort the quality of backlinks from strongest to weakest in terms of domain strength.

What can you do with competitor backlink information?

There are many ways in which you can take your competitor backlink information and use it to your advantage.

See how competitive your niche is

Competitor backlink analysis helps you to create a digital strategy for your website and enables you to assess the competition in an industry. By analyzing competitor websites, it can show how well they’re doing compared with others within your niche.

Try to win those backlinks yourself

You can use competitor backlink information to your advantage and try and win those backlinks yourself. Once you have the list of competitor links, you can use tools like Hunter.io which allows you to input multiple domains and extract the email contact information from those websites.

You can then reach out to them and find backlinks opportunities within their site. Whilst it goes against Google’s guidelines, one of the most common ways in which people reach out to websites is with a fee for a link on the website.

However, you can also reach out to them with content opportunities that will genuinely provide their readers with value. Sometimes you can win these backlinks completely free of charge if that piece of content is genuinely quality.

Is Ahrefs free to use for finding competitor backlinks?

Ahrefs actually offers a free backlink checker that all0ws you to spy on the backlinks pointing at a website. It provides you with the top 100 backlinks pointing at a domain so the data is limited but you can use this for completely free.

If you need complete backlink information from a domain, then you will need to use the paid version of Ahrefs. The lite package starts from $99 per month and whilst it is one of the more expensive paid SEO tools, it provides a lot more backlink and keyword data than a lot of other SEO tools available on the market.

Conclusion

To conclude, you can certainly use Ahrefs to check on competitor backlinks. The backlink analysis tool is fantastic and the data it provides is stand out compared to other SEO tools.

The competing domains report is also a great way to spy on competitors within your niche that you may not be aware of. This is the first step that I tend to use when I build backlinks for clients just because of how easy it is to export and reach out to these sites.

Generally, the more backlinks you have pointing at your site, the better. Your competitor backlinks are one of the actionable ways in which you can begin to rank your key service pages. If they have worked for your competition, then the chances are if you can match them, then you will improve your rankings too.