How to Ethically Spy on Competitor Backlinks?

When you are just starting your journey in the business world, the moment you arrive in the market, the first thing you notice is the fact that so many other businesses have already reserved their spot on the spectrum. That is the very moment you understand how far you still need to go to stand toe to toe with them. One significant characteristic that you notice when you visit the website of any of your competitors is backlinks. Having a online backlink checker tool at your disposal is going to come in very handy in the early stages of your business building journey.

This kind of approach will be more helpful if you are in the retail industry. Keeping a look and having information about your competitors is crucial. It would be best if you kept an eye out for what other businesses are doing. How are they approaching growing their business and helping as many people as possible?

By getting to know what other business owners are doing, you will have an idea about the ads they are publishing and their events. You will have information about making potential customers in their areas curious and excited about them. In this situation, you have the upper hand because you will be saved from the risk of taking the wrong step that will take you away from making profits.

You will build an idea about what you should adopt and those you need to stay away from. This is why you need to analyze all the backlinks present on your competitors' sites. In other words, competitor backlinks help you to learn from those who have more experience. 

Free Link Analysis Can be Ethical

From the idea you may have derived from the brief description of the process, you may have concluded that the process involves breaking a law of some kind. The reality, however, is there are specific ways in which you can spy on the backlinks of your competitors. So stop worrying. Being illegal is far off. It can hardly be considered as being illicit.

Analyzing the backlinks of a competitor merely means that you are trying to gain knowledge from the SEO efforts of the competitor. This article will teach you how to know about your competitors and get ideas to grow your brand through backlinks, all ethically. Making efforts to improve your overall SEO game will gradually improve your rank in popular search engines like Google.

Ways to Improve Your Backlink Analyzing Skills

In this particular section of the blog, we will discuss in detail the three ways in which you can spy on the backlinks of your competitor's official website. We are going to take responsibility for taking your business to new heights.

• Understand the 'Because'

Before you discover a backlink and use the information on it to your advantage, you need to ask yourself the question as to why a particular backlink is present on the website of a specific competitor. Questioning yourself at the very beginning will provide you with answers to a lot of crucial questions.

Firstly, you will know which links are worth replicating for your benefit. Secondly, which areas of your content marketing and link-building process need to improve. Thirdly, you will know which websites will offer you an opportunity to create a guest post for them. Fourthly, you will know who to reach and get in touch with if you plan to create an email outreach campaign. Lastly, you will also get an idea about how you can upgrade your competitor's content and promote your website at the same time.

No content is perfect, and if you can detect the loopholes, your already experienced competitors will most likely let you write guest content and help you boost your brand's growth.

• Use a Backlink Monitoring Tool

Bypassing the manual process altogether will prove highly advantageous because, firstly, you will focus on other methods of growing your business. At the same time, the monitoring process is bound to be simpler and more accurate if you use a tool. You will have access to essential metrics of your competitors' backlinks by using the tool, which you won't have otherwise. Following are some of those examples.

Firstly, you will have information about when the backlink was first seen. Secondly, you will have data about the status of the backlink. Thirdly, you will have information about the URL the backlink is from and the URL it is targeted towards. Lastly, you will also have information about the anchor text used for the links. These are just some examples that give you an idea of what you gain.

• Always Strive to be An Ethical Spy

When you are strolling through a competitor's website, you are spying through it and getting information about the backlinks that are present. Even after everything, you need to make sure that you maintain the ethical side of things. If you are not careful, even a small move can prove harmful.

You cannot harm your competitor until you genuinely want to. The only way you can hamper the ranking of your rival's website is through negative SEO. Unless you do this, you are not at the risk of affecting your competitor through backlink analysis.

There are a few ways to ensure that ethics are maintained:

• When you are deep into the monitoring game, ensure that you monitor at least three top rivals.
• Never strive to stalk your competitors and take all their backlinks. Focus just on the high-quality ones.
• Analyze only those backlinks of your niche and reach the right audience.

Make Use of Backlinks the Right Way

You must have already understood from the above blog that all backlinks will not benefit you in the same way. Some may even waste your time and effort. In the backlinks game, choosing just the right ones is immensely crucial. If you replicate a backlink that is not even in your niche, your store will make zero sales through that particular backlink. Choose valuable backlinks for your online store and maintain ethics simultaneously. Maybe, this is why Brian Sutter from Forbes.com has remarked,

“Sadly, much of the content being published is simply not worth linking to. 75% of it is getting zero inbound links. So forget the ‘more is better' approach to content if you want links. Go with quality instead. Your content will generate links only if it is truly exceptional—’remarkable,’ as Seth Godin would say.”