Business Benefits
Determine whether a link-building campaign is needed to improve your website authority by analyzing the competitive landscape.
Find broad competitors by searching for businesses in your industry, niche competitors by looking for businesses that sell the same product or service, and keyword competitors by typing your most important keywords into Google and finding websites that rank well for these.
Create a spreadsheet with the following columns: Domain, DR, Estimated Organic Keywords, Estimated Organic Traffic, Referring Domains, Backlinks, Facebook Followers, Instagram Followers, Twitter Followers, and Google Reviews.
Add or subtract columns for any social media platform that may be relevant and any other 3rd parties where you may have reviews for your business.
Assess off-page signals for your website as well as competitor websites and note the results in the spreadsheet.
- Type your website into a tool like Ahrefs and look at your domain rating, estimated organic keywords, number of referring domains, number of backlinks, number of outgoing links, and estimated organic traffic.
- Look at the number of followers you have on your social media accounts and the number of reviews on Google and 3rd party listings.
- Repeat the process for all of your competitors.
Add a new tab to your spreadsheet and add columns for Domain, Total Keywords Ranked, Duplicate Content, Common Content, Unique Content, Blog, HTTPS, Domain Age (years), .com (y/n), Mobile Friendly (y/n), and Page Speed (mobile/desktop).
Enter your website and add each competitor’s website on a separate row in the Domain column.
Asses on-page signals for your website as well as competing websites and note the results in the spreadsheet.
- Use Ahrefs to get the Total Keywords Ranked. For duplicate, common and unique content use Siteliner. For the blog section, manually check the website.
- To check the domain age, use a tool like Websiteseochecker’s domain age checker
- Manually check the security SSL and TLD.
- To check if it’s mobile-friendly, use Google’s mobile friendly tool.
- For page speed (mobile/desktop) use Googles developer Page speed tool.
- To check SEO Score, use a tool like Sureoak’s SEO checker tool
Assess your competitors’ link building strategies by looking at their backlink profiles on a tool like Ahrefs. Note down common backlinking strategies in your niche.
- Use Ahrefs to look at your competitors’ backlinks profiles and sort these by DR.
- In the report, you will be able to see whether the links are dofollow or nofollow, the anchor text used and the referring page.
- Open up a few referring pages that have dofollow links to your competitors and see whether that link was obtained via a guest post (by checking the author profile to see if somebody related to the company has written it), an editorial insertion, an infographic or a PR link.
Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T11:00:48Z