Obtaining links is often not that easy. However, an analysis of your competitors and their link profiles can give you valuable tips on how to improve your own backlinks.
When searching for relevant traffic sources, you quickly come across links – with good reason. Linking is exciting for at least two reasons: On the one hand, your target group can find you via links, so they provide you with regular referral traffic. On the other hand, links are still an important ranking factor within the unpaid (organic) search results.
Draw Inspiration From Your Competition
While creating content for your page, you will probably have searched Google frequently for your target keywords. There, you may have noticed that certain websites appeared regularly in the top positions. They were “visible” – which can be proven numerically with the SISTRIX Visibility Index. Visibility sometimes increases and sometimes decreases.
Generally, visibility is the result of (content-related) relevance of the target pages and their linking on the web. The Visibility Index can be understood as the market share of a website on Google. It shows whether the rankings have improved or worsened over time.
With this knowledge, you can start looking for the links that you also would like to get. You should have already achieved content relevance through your onpage optimisation.
If you already have some rankings with your website, you can use the Competitors feature in SISTRIX to search for websites that have overlapping keywords with you. The higher their visibility, the more exciting it can be to examine the link profiles of these sites. After all, they appear high up in the results because they are relevant in terms of content and have relevant links.
Select a competitor and take a closer look at them. By clicking on the corresponding hostname in the competitor list and then on the “Link Overview” section in the navigation on the left-hand side, you can access the backlink data of the desired domain. In the data box “Top Referring Domains” you can see the link providers of your competitor with a high visibility at a glance – a potential link provider for you could also be hidden among them.
Click on the sub-function “Links” in the navigation on the left-hand side to see which links a competitor currently has. In the table, you have the option of displaying only the data columns that are relevant to you. To do this, click on the cogwheel at the top right of the table and then on “Select Columns”.
Apart from that, you can also filter the results according to certain factors. In the screenshot above, the link table has been filtered by “Follow-Links” 1 as well as “With high Visibility Index” 2 to show pages where linking is likely to bring in many visitors.
Now we have an overview of the competitor’s link profile.
In the next step, it is interesting to look at the links of individual pages. This way, you can figure out which links help an individual sub-page achieve a good ranking. To do this, you can look at your competitor’s top link targets under “Linked Pages”.
By clicking on the plus behind an address, in the picture above at 3, you will be taken directly to the link analysis: There you will see the link providers that refer to the corresponding link target.
You will certainly want to acquire some of them for yourself. But instead of memorising all the addresses, you can download them using the small cogwheel at the top right of the table.
Link Opportunities and Profiting From Broken Links
Now you have a good overview of the link profile of your competitor. Maybe you already have ideas on how you can acquire new links yourself. In the next step, you can compare up to three of your competitors with your domain using the Opportunities feature, which is explained in more detail in this tutorial. This way, you can see at a glance who your competition is getting links from, but you are not yet.
Another step can be “broken link building“. This means uncovering broken links from your competition, pointing them out to the link-giving page as well as directly suggesting alternative content on your own website, and thus obtaining new backlinks for your website. We will also explain how you can do this with SISTRIX in a separate tutorial.
Conclusion
As you can see, many paths within SISTRIX lead you to the overview of the individual links. Use the filters available here, because they will help you discover many relevant links.
For inspiration: Filter domains,
- that have a high domain popularity,
- whose top-level domain corresponds to your target country,
- that have been found recently.
Stephan Czysch contributed to this tutorial. Stephan was the founder and managing director of the Berlin online marketing agency Trust Agents and is now a self-employed SEO consultant. He regularly speaks at conferences and passes on his knowledge in workshops.
