How to Check Competitor Backlinks & Make Them Your Own

“Stealing” competitor backlinks is one of the most easily scalable link building strategies. 

Every site that links to a competitor but not you makes for a potential link building prospect.

Competitor backlink analysis also grants you insights into your competitor’s off-page strategies so you can tweak your own.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• Why you should regularly check competitor backlinks
• How to find your real search competitors and check their backlinks
• How to find backlink gaps and close them with Respona 

Let’s begin. 

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Why Would You Want to Check Competitor Backlinks?

In the intro, we mentioned that competitor backlinks make for the perfect link building prospects. 

Depending on your niche, the competitor backlink strategy can be extremely scalable. 

For example, in ours (which is link building and SEO), we have giants like Ahrefs, Moz and Backlinko with hundreds or even thousands of high-quality backlinks per post. 

Take Moz’s beginner guide to SEO – it has 3200 backlinks pointed to just a single page. 

Absolute goldmine – and that’s only counting dofollow links from DR 30+ sites in English.

In reality there are even more links, just lower quality. 

And all it took for us to find these links is 30 seconds. 

Compare that with the amount of time needed to find, for example, link insertion opportunities on a specific anchor text and you get a link building strategy that’s incredibly time-efficient.

So, how do you start?

Identify Your Search Competitors 

Now, of course, you already know who your main, or domain level competitors are. 

But (especially when it comes to long-tail keywords) you may be surprised how many other businesses you might be competing with on SERPs, even if you’re not targeting the exact same user base.

For example, Ahrefs is not a competitor to our tool at all – Respona is an all-in-one email outreach platform and they are an SEO monitoring software.

However, we still target a lot of the same keywords – both short and long-tail, so we are page level competitors. 

To check your search competitors, simply Google your target keywords and see what pops up:

Analitify are also not direct competitors to us – but on search engine results pages, it’s a completely different story.

Use a Backlink Checker

Once you identify your search competitors, you can start to check their links. 

For this, you’re going to need a backlink checker. 

There are many available, but the most popular are Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz. 

We also offer our own free backlink checker if you’re just looking for a one-off lookup. 

We use Ahrefs for in-depth analysis, so that’s the software we’ll focus on in this article. 

To check competitor backlinks, first paste their URL into Site Explorer:

If you paste your competitor’s domain, it will show all of their backlinks after you click on the number under “backlinks”. 

Conversely, if you paste a specific blog post URL, you’ll get the links pointing to that page only. 

What we like to do every time we publish a new article is to gather all competing URLs and reach out to their backlinks. 

For now, let’s walk through some useful filters for finding good link building opportunities among thousands of competitor backlinks. 

• Dofollow
• DR: From 30
• Domain traffic: From 1K 
• One link per domain

For SEO purposes, you’re only interested in dofollow links, since they’re the ones that pass link juice. 

You can change the numbers in the Domain Rating and Domain Traffic filters, but we like to focus on DR 30+ sites with at least 1K monthly traffic.

This way, we can be sure that the links we get will actually be valuable. 

And make sure to enable the “One link per domain” filter – or you’ll be greeted with a bunch of duplicate domains.

You can allso use this report to check your own site for broken links. 

Identify Backlink Gaps

Ahrefs has a very handy competitive analysis feature – and so does Semrush. 

It’s perfect for finding backlink gaps – i.e. sites that link to your competitors but not to you. 

All you have to do to use it is select it from the top menu, switch it to referring domains instead of keywords and paste at least one competitor. 

You can also analyze multiple competitors here. 

Similarly to the normal link profile report, you can use it to check domain-wide links as well as compare specific pages. 

By default, after you click “Show link opportunities”, it will show you domains linking to your competitors. 

To check specific pages, click “Referring pages” in the top left. 

You can use all the same filters from the previous step here.

From here, export your sheet of competitor backlinks and prepare for outreach.

Create a Campaign in Respona & Prepare Your Sequence

You can also skip the previous steps entirely and use Respona’s Skyscraper Technique campaign template. 

It will check competitor backlinks for you, automatically pull them into your campaign, find contact information, and even personalize your link pitches with AI.

But, since we already went through the effort of getting a list of competitor backlinks, let’s use it. 

To import it into Respona, you’ll first have to create an advanced campaign. 

The first step in the campaign is to prepare your email sequence. 

Respona offers a variety of pre-built templates for every link building strategy out there, but we recommend coming up with your own formulae for email campaigns. 

Not sure how to write an email that gets people to link to you?

Check out our video that walks through each part of an email, from subject line to sign-off.

Import Your Sheet and Start the Email Finder

The next step is to import your sheet. 

It takes a little bit more than just clicking on it and hitting “import” – although that is indeed the starting point.

Next, you’ll need to assign your file fields to the corresponding Respona variables. 

This is done in case you’re using custom variables like a guest post idea as opposed to Respona’s built-in AI.

In our case, the only variable that matters is the URL – it identifies each individual link opportunity within the campaign. 

It may look intimidating at first but there’s nothing to fear – just pick the file fields from their drop-downs, and do the same for the Respona fields.

So, URL to URL, First Name to First Name, and so on. 

Click “Continue” when ready. 

On this screen, you can change email finder settings and tweak AI personalization prompts. 

For the email finder, pick the “Blogs” link opportunity type and enter some job positions relevant to link building (editor, content manager, etc.), at all seniority levels. 

Keep the skip catch-all domains and use generic emails as needed options on to get more successful results while keeping deliverability high. 

As for AI personalization settings, if you’ve worked with GPT, you already know what to do. 

You can give it general instructions, or provide examples of previous, manual personalizations to make it “sound” like you.

Once everything is good to go, click “Import”.

Respona will do three things at once: 

1. Import your competitor backlinks sheet
2. Find relevant contact information
3. Personalize your pitches with AI (if you used AI variables)

Once the process is complete, you can move to the final step. 

Review & Launch 

Here, you can review your AI personalizations and make manual edits where necessary. 

In addition to email addresses, Respona also finds the LinkedIn profiles of your prospects, so we recommend sending them a connection request there as well. 

During launch, Respona also double-checks that all fields are populated, and you’re not reaching out to any duplicate contacts. 

Once the campaign is started, all you have to do is wait for responses and negotiate your link exchanges.

Link building cheat sheet

Gain access to the 3-step strategy we use to earn over 86 high-quality backlinks each month.

Download for free

Now Over to You

In conclusion, to check competitor backlinks, you’ll need a backlink monitoring tool like the  Ahrefs Link Explorer or Semrush.

And to make those links yours, you’ll need to reach out to the people behind those linking sites, and persuade them to link to you instead (usually for an indirect, high quality backlink in return). 

Need help getting more competitor backlinks?

Don’t hesitate to start your 14-day free trial with Respona to see how we can help. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is the easiest way to check competitor backlinks?

The easiest way is to use a dedicated backlink analysis tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz. 

Simply enter your competitor’s URL into the site explorer, and the tool will generate a list of their backlinks. 

Many of these tools also offer free trials or limited free versions for basic analysis.

Why are dofollow backlinks more important than nofollow backlinks?

Dofollow backlinks pass “link juice,” which is a signal to search engines that the linked site is trustworthy and relevant. 

This helps boost the linked site’s search engine rankings. 

Nofollow links, on the other hand, don’t pass this link equity, although they can still drive referral traffic.

How can I find quality backlink opportunities that my SEO competitors have but I don’t?

Most SEO tools have a “link intersect” or “gap analysis” feature. 

This allows you to compare the competitor backlink profiles of multiple sites and identify websites that link to them but not to you. 

These are prime opportunities for outreach.

What metrics should I look for when analyzing competitor backlinks?

Key metrics include Domain Rating (DR) or Domain Authority (DA), which indicate the overall strength of a competitor backlink profile. 

You should also look at referring domains (the number of unique websites linking to the competitor), and the relevance of the linking site to your niche.

How can I ethically “steal” competitor backlinks?

You’re not actually stealing them, but rather identifying opportunities. 

By analyzing why those websites link to your competitors, you can create even better content, build relationships with those websites, and offer them a compelling reason to link to you as well, such as by offering a more comprehensive resource, updated information, or a unique perspective.