Uncovering Backlink Opportunities: A Comprehensive Guide to Finding and Acquiring High-Quality Backlinks

How to Find & Check Backlinks: Your Ultimate Guide

Why are Backlinks Important

Backlinks are crucial for long-term Google rankings. No SEO can deny that truth.

Links on the World Wide Web provide pathways to search engine crawlers, helping with crawling, indexation, and rankings.

More importantly, backlinks build your authority in the industry as they serve as votes from other webmasters.

Why Conduct a Competitor Backlinks Analysis

Probably the best way to be successful in SEO is by replicating what’s already working.

Your top competitors are your best guides when it comes to link-building.

By analyzing their link profiles, you eliminate the guesswork and can confidently move forward.

A backlink analysis lets you:

Understand where your website stands
Give insights into your competitor's strategies
Identify new opportunities to crush competitor

Note that your website’s link profile is going to differ from your competitors in several aspects, including

The anchor text distribution
The ratio between dofollow and nofollow links
The quality of referring domains
The spam score

Overall, competitor link analysis gives you the information you need to stay competitive and build backlinks that matter.

Finding Backlinks of Your Own Website

Before doing a backlink competitor analysis, know where your website stands.

To do that, you can use any of the SEO tools we’ll discuss below.

Google Search Console gives you a list of linking domains inside the “Links” report.

To access it, sign in to your GSC account and select the relevant property (Website you want to check backlinks of).

Next, click on “Links” at the bottom-left corner.

Scroll down and go to the complete report of “Top Linking Sites” by clicking on “More”.

You’ll get a list of websites linking to your domain.

You can download it as a CSV file or return to this report whenever you need to.

Unfortunately, this method only works with websites you own.

Tools for Finding Backlinks of a Competitor

Thankfully, you don’t need to be an SEO expert to reverse-engineer your competitors’ backlink profiles.

Here’s how to get competitors backlinks with top SEO tools.

Semrush

Semrush is one of the best tools to check any website’s backlink profile.

To look up backlinks of a competitor, just plug the URL into Semrush’s Backlinks Analytics tool and hit “Analyze”. Next, go to the “Backlinks” tab. You’ll see the list of backlinks for that particular domain with important information like:

Authority score
Anchor text
The page title and URL
And more

In short, it tells you the quality of the links pointing to that competing domain.

Semrush is a paid tool, with varying pricing plans. But, you can get its free trial with premium features for a limited time.

Moz Link Explorer

With Moz Link Explorer, you can check the backlinks of any website you want, including your competitor’s.

With simple plug-and-play, you can find all the backlinks of a competing site.

Plus, the tool tells you everything you need to gauge the quality of links pointing to a competitor’s website, including:

The domain authority (DA score)
The page authority (PA score)
The spam score

Here’s how you do competitor backlinks analysis with it:

Copy and paste the URL of the website into the Link Explorer and click on “Analyze”.

On the next page, click on “Inbound links”.

You’ll get a list of web pages linking to that particular competitor’s website.

In front of each URL (backlink of your competitor), you’ll see the PA, DA, linking domains, and spam score.

All that data tells you about the quality and authority of these linking pages.

You get 10 free searches per month on the free Moz account.

However, the data you’ll get is limited.

You can use all the pro features of the tool by getting its 30-day free trial.

Ubersuggest

The next one on our list is Ubersuggest, the Neilpatel backlink checker.

Ubersuggest is a one-stop shop for almost all your SEO needs, including competitor backlink analysis.

It’s an excellent tool with a generous free plan, making it perfect for startups and webmasters with a limited SEO budget.

After signing up for a free Ubersuggest account, go to “Backlinks” and put your competitor’s URL into the search bar.

You’ll get the following table:

You’ll get a list of competitor backlinks with metrics like:

Domain authority (Moz metric)
Page authority (Moz metrics)
Spam score
Anchor text

You’ll get 3 searches per day on the free plan. And, to see the full list of backlinks, you’ll have to upgrade.

Unlike other SEO tools, Ubersuggest also has lifetime offers.

Ahrefs

If you’re looking for a premium, all-in-one SEO tool, Ahrefs is one of the best options.

To check competitors backlinks, enter their URLs into Ahrefs Backlink Checker.

Enter any URL and it’ll fetch the backlinks pointing to it for free.

Note that the free search offers limited results. To get the full picture of a site’s link profile, you’ll have to get a subscription.

In addition to the basic metrics of sites linking to a competitor, Ahrefs also provides a list of broken and lost links.

Subscriptions of the tool start from $99 and go as high as $999.

Assessing the Quality of a Backlink

Replicating a competitor’s backlinks profile is a powerful way to gain higher search engine rankings.

However, you need to be sure those backlinks won’t affect your SEO standings adversely.

This is why it’s crucial to check the quality of a backlink before building it.

Here are a few factors to look at.

Domain Authority

Domain authority is a Moz metric that provides an estimate of the overall authority of a domain.

Of course, you want links from high-authority domains. So, even if your competitor is getting a backlink from a low-quality site, it will not be worth pursuing.

Relevance to Your Content

Links from generic or irrelevant websites aren’t generally worth the effort.

Work on getting backlinks from pages with content relevant to your industry.

Quality of Content

Another factor to look out for is the quality of the content on the linking web page.

If you’re writing a guest post, be sure to create a high-quality piece of content.

In case you’re working on a different link-building strategy, read the content on the linking page for quality.

Spam Score

The spam score indicates how spammy the backlinks of a domain are.

A high spam score means the website has likely been involved in spammy activities.

Optimize Anchor Text

Anchor text is text that links one web page to another.

Using relevant anchor text is important because it helps search engines understand the context.

This is why a keyword-rich anchor text helps you rank for that keyword.

However, over-optimizing it could work against you.

So, while pursuing backlinks, make sure you’re not using your target keyword too many times. Use different variations of it.

Finding Backlinks of a Website: FAQs

Here are a few of the most frequently asked questions about finding backlinks.

How do I find backlinks on Google?

You can find backlinks on Google by using a variety of SEO tools including Google Search Console, Semrush, Moz, Ahrefs, and even Google Analytics. To find backlinks in Google Analytics 4, go to “Acquisition” > “Traffic Acquisition”.

How do I find backlinks to keywords?

Sign in to your Google Search Console account and select the property you want to check the backlinks of. On the bottom-left corner, click on “Links”. Next, go to “Top Linking Sites” under “External Links”.

How to find all the backlinks of any website?

To find all the backlinks of any website, you can use an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush. Enter any URL and these tools will give you a complete list of backlinks to that URL.

Should You Research Your Competitors Backlinks?

Yes, competitor backlink research helps you find new link-building opportunities. It also eliminates guesswork and lets you work on backlinks that can help you outrank the competition on Google.