If you own a business, then you’ll have to don many hats. From handling different profiles to managing the marketing department, it is a never-ending process that challenges you to keep going. The biggest work for any business is its marketing, which plays an important role.

If you don’t market your products or services, you won’t increase your sales or website traffic. However, any marketing strategy comes with its own hurdles. One of them is tackling extreme competition, especially if the product goes in similar niche. That’s where you can make use of ethical spying on your competitors.

Spying on your competitors is a well-known practice, and most companies do it. It can be broadly described as a complete analysis of what your competitors are up to, what they are doing, and what they could be doing better.

When you spy on your competitors’ or perform a competitor analysis, you come across different types of data and information. This data could be used as a fair business advantage. You could know about what types of keywords they use and what their social media marketing strategy is. By spying on them, you could also know about their backlinks.

The Importance of Checking Backlinks

Backlinks features in Google’s most important ranking factor. Bigger websites use skyscraper technique to earn more backlinks. When you spy on our competitor’s backlinks, it allows you to gain more linking opportunities.

From an SEO perspective, backlinks act as a vote of confidence from one website to another. It also plays a crucial part in organic search ranking in SERPs. If the website ranks organically in search results, then it will drive good traffic to the site. Building backlinks for your site will also increase your site’s ranking.

5 Easy Ways To Spy On Your Competitors Backlinks:

1] Monitor the backlinks

You need to start the process by monitoring the backlink strategy of your competitors. This will give you a better insight into their backlink strategy and help you gain knowledge about where they are getting their backlinks from.

Once you know from where they are acquiring links, reach out to that websites or forums and email them to try your products.

As soon as the new websites try your products, they may do a review on you. They may also turn out to be your customers and get you more customers in the process. Plus, use different tools for getting backlink reports as that may help you to come up with a strategy.

2] Find your competitor’s guest posts

Guest blogging is one of the simplest and effective SEO strategies to get high-quality links to your website. Your competitors might be using this technique, and you may not be aware of it. Use Google advanced search query for finding a competitor’s guest post.

There are several queries to try with this context. This also depends on the kind of links you are searching for. Use the Google image search option to find all the posts that contain the author’s headshot.

The most popular way to find guest posts is by using the Ahrefs content explorer. By using the tool, you’ll be able to find written content by a particular author.

If your competitors have published a guest post on a site, then there are chances you could also get the guest post published on that site.

3] Find links from page-level competitors

Use spy linking tools to find your competitors most linked content. This will help you to build backlinks as you’ll have a list of websites you can reach out to. Once you find a page with the most links, use it to the advantage of your site.

Using the keyword explorer tool, paste in the page titles, and you’ll get the SERP overview. It will show you the ranking pages for the topic you choose. The whole idea to use this trick is to find your competitor’s most popular content.

Once aware, it is easier to develop your content strategy. If you want more content linking opportunities, you need to follow this process quite often. Link building is a constant process in SEO, you need to know about your competitor’s website so that you are secured in web space.

4] Find your competitor’s broken links

The broken link building process yields excellent results. You can use the broken link checker tool available for this. The most popular tool is Ahrefs Broken Link Checker. Enter your competitor’s domain and look for referring domains that will show you website links to broken pages.

If you are lucky, you’ll be able to uncover a broken page with hundreds or thousands of links. You need to find the broken pages with tons of links based on your niche.

Replicate the content if you want to use this opportunity, but remember that a link building strategy takes time and efforts.

5] Carry out a link profile audit

Link profile audit plays the most important part of the backlink strategy; it lets you know about your competitor’s links and ways to replicate those links. You can always start with audit research and get a fair idea of your competitor’s links.

Find all the links in the audit process that are sending unique traffic to your website. Use the Google console feature for analyzing your backlinks and create a copy of those links in the spreadsheet.

Evaluate the links manually and know which links are working and which links are not working. With an audit, you’ll also get a fair list of domain authority. Use the SEMrush tool for backlink audits that checks the backlinks for any red flags. This will help you to find toxic links.

Spy on other websites,

Spying on competitors’ backlinks will not only allow you to drive traffic to your site but will also help you get more linking opportunities. You can follow the backlink mirroring strategy and replicate your competitor’s strategy without any effort.

Author

Nirav Dave is a Tech & Social enthusiast. He is also a Web Entrepreneur by Profession and loves to write about the latest trends in Social Media & SEO. You may also follow him on Twitter | Facebook