How to Analyse Your Competitors' Backlink Strategy

The short version: analysing a competitor's backlink strategy means pulling their full link profile, sorting it by link type and authority rather than sheer volume, then working out which links are driving their rankings versus which are just noise they picked up along the way. Most people stop at "they have more backlinks than me" and give up, which tells you nothing useful. The real work is in the pattern, not the count.

Why the backlink count is the least useful number on the page

Open any free checker, type in a rival's domain, and you'll get a number. 4,200 backlinks. Looks impressive. Means almost nothing on its own. I've seen domains with 400 backlinks outrank domains with 40,000, because quality and relevance beat volume every time. If you start your competitor analysis by comparing totals, you're starting in the wrong place, and you'll end up chasing the wrong targets for months.

What matters is where those links come from, what anchor text they use, how old they are, and whether they're still live. A rival's backlink profile is a map of their last two or three years of outreach, digital PR and content decisions. Your job is to read that map, not just admire its size.

Step one: pull the full profile, not just the top ten

Use a backlink tool (Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz all do this, with free trials or limited free versions) and export every referring domain for your top two or three competitors. Don't just eyeball the dashboard. Get it into a spreadsheet. You want columns for domain rating or authority score, the linking page URL, anchor text, link type (guest post, directory, press mention, resource page, forum, etc), and first-seen date.

If you don't want to pay for a tool yet, there's a manual route too, and I've written a full walkthrough on finding and analysing competitor backlinks using Google search alone, which works surprisingly well for smaller sites with fewer than a few hundred links.

Step two: sort by link type, not domain authority

This is where most people go wrong. They sort by DA or DR and chase the highest numbers, ignoring that a DR 80 link from a random "best tools" listicle that links to 400 other sites is worth less than a DR 40 link from a genuine industry publication that linked to three companies all year.

Group every link into categories:

• Digital PR and press mentions (journalist wrote about them)
• Guest posts (they wrote for someone else's site)
• Resource and "best of" pages (they got added to a list)
• Directory and citation links (low effort, usually low value)
• Forum, comment and profile links (usually worthless, ignore them)
• Broken or redirected links (don't waste time replicating dead strategies)

Once sorted, look at the ratio. A competitor with 60 percent digital PR links and 10 percent directories is running a very different, more expensive strategy than one with 60 percent directories and 5 percent PR. Knowing which one you're up against changes your entire plan.

A worked example

Say you run a small accountancy practice in Manchester competing locally against two bigger firms. You pull both competitors' backlink profiles and find Competitor A has 180 referring domains, mostly from local business directories and a chamber of commerce listing, average DR around 25. Competitor B has only 95 referring domains, but 20 of them are from finance journalists covering budget changes, tax deadline stories and small business survival rates, average DR 55.

Competitor A looks bigger on paper. Competitor B is almost certainly getting more qualified traffic and ranking better for competitive terms, because those press links sit on pages people read and trust. If you only looked at the total count, you'd copy Competitor A's directory-heavy approach and waste three months submitting your firm to 150 listings that move nothing. Read the pattern and you'd spend that time pitching three or four finance journalists instead, which is harder but worth far more.

Step three: check anchor text patterns

Pull every anchor text used across a competitor's backlinks and look at the split between branded (their company name), exact match keyword (the thing they want to rank for), and generic ("click here", "read more"). A healthy, natural profile usually leans heavily branded, maybe 60 to 70 percent, with the rest spread across keyword and generic variations.

If you see a competitor with 40 percent exact-match keyword anchors, that's often a sign they've bought links or run an aggressive, slightly risky outreach campaign. It might be working for them right now. It's also the kind of pattern that gets hit hardest when Google runs a link spam update. Don't copy it blindly just because it looks like it's working this quarter.

Step four: find the gap links, not just the shared ones

Most tools have a "link intersect" or "content gap" feature that shows you domains linking to two or three competitors but not to you. This is the single most actionable output of the whole exercise. These are sites that have already shown willingness to link to businesses like yours, in your space, which means your outreach success rate on that list will be far higher than cold prospecting.

In the accountancy example above, if both competitors are linked from a regional business news site but neither is linked from the local university's business school resource page, that university page is your gap opportunity. Go after it specifically.

Step five: track the strategy over time, not as a one-off snapshot

A single pull of a competitor's backlinks tells you where they are. It doesn't tell you where they're heading. Pull the same competitor's profile again every month or quarter and watch what changes: which links drop off, which new ones appear, whether their velocity is speeding up or slowing down. A competitor adding 15 new high-authority links a month is investing heavily in PR or content right now, and that's worth knowing before they pull further ahead. I've laid out a simple method for doing this without paying for an expensive subscription in my guide on how to track backlinks over time without a paid tool.

The uncomfortable bit nobody wants to say out loud

Here's what most competitor backlink guides won't tell you plainly: a large chunk of any big competitor's backlink profile is links you cannot and should not try to replicate. Links from a decade-old relationship with a trade body. A mention because their founder went to school with a journalist. A citation from a press release that went out before Google even existed in its current form. Trying to reverse-engineer every single link in someone's profile is a waste of time, because some of it was luck, timing or relationships you don't have access to.

The useful work isn't copying their whole profile. It's identifying the 20 to 30 percent of links that were earned through a repeatable process, link building from a useful resource, a data study, a commentable news angle, and copying the process, not the exact link. If you find yourself trying to get the exact same backlink a competitor has, from the exact same site, you're often chasing a one-off rather than building a strategy.

What to do with all this once you've analysed it

Analysis without action is just an interesting spreadsheet. Once you've mapped the patterns, gaps and types, turn it into a short plan: which three link types will you pursue this quarter (say, digital PR pitches, guest posts on two named industry sites, and claiming five gap-link opportunities), and roughly how many hours or what budget that needs. If you're doing this from scratch, my piece on building backlinks for a business site without wasting six months on nothing walks through the practical build-out, and if you want the free routes first, there's a solid list in where to find free backlink opportunities for your website.

It's also worth being honest with yourself about whether backlinks are even your biggest lever right now. I cover this in why backlinks matter for SEO strategy, and why some barely move the needle, because for some sites, content gaps or technical issues matter more than another ten links this month.

If you'd rather have someone map this out for you and set the whole link strategy alongside the rest of your SEO and content plan, that's exactly the kind of work an AI consultant for small business can help pull together, especially if you're trying to use AI tools to speed up the research and outreach side without losing the quality control.

Frequently asked questions

How many competitors should I analyse for backlinks?

Two or three is plenty. Pick the ones ranking directly above you for your main keywords, not the biggest brand in your industry if they're out of your weight class, otherwise the gaps you find will be unrealistic to close.

Is it worth paying for a backlink tool just for this?

If you're doing a one-off analysis, a free trial of Ahrefs or Semrush is enough. If you plan to track competitors monthly, a paid subscription usually pays for itself once you factor in the time saved versus manual Google searching.

How do I know if a competitor's links are low quality or spammy?

Check the anchor text split, look for a high percentage of exact-match keywords, scan for links from obviously unrelated or low-traffic sites, and check whether the domain's traffic has dropped since a known Google update, which often signals a penalty tied to that link pattern.

Should I try to get the exact same backlinks as my competitor?

Only the ones built through a repeatable process like guest posting, data studies or press outreach. Skip the one-off links that came from personal relationships, old press releases or luck, you can't recreate those and chasing them wastes time better spent elsewhere.