How to Check Competitor’s Backlinks in Effective Ways

Competitor backlinking is an SEO strategy that involves analyzing the backlinks of your competitor’s websites within a vertical search. This activity aims to increase organic search engine rankings and increase an understanding of the link-building strategies used by business competitors. It is possible to gain insight into the number of links and the quality required for high ranking in SERPs.

Types of Competitors:

Domain-Level Competitors:

They include those websites that compete with you in the SERPs. They publish content in your niche and compete with your site for various keywords.

 You can use Ahrefs to find your domain-level competitors; for example, in the screenshot below, we have checked the competing domains of Marketing Lad.

Our most significant competitors in SERPs are linkbuilder.io, outreachmonks.com, backlinkboss.com, etc.

You can export this data to Google Sheets and make a note of the five most significant competitors on Google Sheets.

Page-Level Competitors:

These sites compete with you on a page level for a particular topic or keyword and are not your competitors.

For example, we have a post called,’’ SEMSCOOP REVIEW: A KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOL IN 2025’’, which targets keywords like ‘’SEMScoop Review’’.

As you can see from the above screenshot, itsblogging.com isn’t a domain-wide competitor; they still compete with us for this term. Their SEMScoop review ranks in the top 10 after us!

How do you find page-level competitors?

Pick a page or a post on your website and paste it into the Keyword Explorer of Ahrefs. Then scroll down to check the SERP overview for ‘’SEMScoop Review’’.

The above are page-level competitors; domain- and page-level competitors sometimes overlap.

Steps to find Competitor Backlinks:

Find your main keywords:

The first step in finding your competitors’ backlinks is determining the keywords contributing to your website’s search visibility. You must use advanced keyword research tools like SpyFu, SE Ranking, Ahrefs, Moz and SEMrush. For example, you can enter your competitor’s domain in Site Explorer of Ahrefs, and you will get the amount of search traffic for each keyword, your position in SERPs, those particular keywords that are driving traffic to your site, etc, as shown in the screenshot below.

Find your primary competitors:

To find out your main competitors, you can follow the below steps:

• You can start by doing a ‘related’ search on Google. In this way, you will get a list of websites that have topics related to yours.

related:[keyword]

For example, the search query for youtube.com would look for search suggestions from YouTube

Another way to find your competitors is to use Ahrefs.

You can discover thousands of link opportunities by researching your competitor’s homepage links.

Go to Site Explorer→Backlink profile→Anchors

Most links use branded anchors because users link to home pages when mentioning a brand rather than something more specific. This way, you can analyze your competitors’ homepage links to see where they are getting mentioned.

For instance, linkbuilder.io is one of our domain-level competitors and has been mentioned on 600+ websites.

Now, the question is, ‘’Why did they mention them (linkbuilder.io) but not us (marketinglad.io)?

 Let’s find out!

Enter one of your domain-level competitors into Site Explorer, go to the Backlinks report, and add a dofollow filter. You will get a list of all the backlinks pointing to your competitor’s homepage.

You can usually figure out the reason by quickly looking at the anchor text, surrounding link text, and the page title. By analyzing your competitor’s backlinks, you can get to know the DR of their website, the number of referring domains, the number of backlinks, the URL rating of the referral pages, the top backlinks, anchor text, and web pages.

Assessing the URLs of page-level competitors:

In this step, you don’t have to perform a backlink analysis on the entire website; you only need to audit one URL at a time. You need to click on the ‘’Exact URL’’ option,

It restricts the backlink analysis to a specific URL. You can use any backlink analysis tool to check the competitor backlinks.

Conclusion:

We have provided some of the ways you can find competitor backlinks. You can use any backlink checker like Ahrefs, Moz, SEMrush, etc., analyze each backlink carefully, and build a strong link-building strategy to improve your position in SERPs.

P.S: Read our Question Answer Blog here!